"The press may be filled with stories about the vast market potential of China and India, but the US-EU capital markets remain the most deep, liquid, transparent, and sophisticated in the world," said Bertrand Huet, SIFMA's European legal and regulatory counsel and managing director.

"The recent market turmoil demonstrated that, once separated by vast oceans and national boundaries, our capital markets are more interconnected now than ever before," added Huet.

One of SIFMA's goals, as a global securities trade association, is to promote and facilitate broader and more efficient global capital markets. This entails reducing barriers, increasing efficiency of cross-border transactions, and lowering the cost of capital. Since the transatlantic financial services market is the major driver of the global market, reducing unnecessary and duplicative regulations there represents a major step forward in producing significant efficiencies for market participants and investors.

The EU-US Coalition, a group of industry bodies from the EU and the US, estimate that true integration of financial markets could lower trading costs on both sides of the Atlantic by 60%, which would in turn lead to a 50% increase in US and EU trading volumes.