Banco de Portugal's Raposo: uncertainty is no excuse to delay investment

Serguey Asael Shinder14 October 2026, 09:542 min read

Clara Raposo, Vice-Governor of the Banco de Portugal, closed the 8th Capital Markets Seminar "Financing Europe" in Luxembourg on 1 October 2026 — an event organised by the European Commission, the European Investment Bank and the European Stability Mechanism. The BIS published the keynote on 13 October. Raposo framed the talk "through the lens of a central banker", adding a background as a corporate finance professor, board member of a European central securities depository and chair of a company that listed in Lisbon in 2021.

The question. After two days of debate on financing Europe's priorities, Raposo reduced the discussion to one answer: Europe should prioritise investments whose value remains high across a wide range of possible futures. Uncertainty should make investors and governments more rigorous — testing assumptions, examining alternative scenarios — but, in her words, "it should not become an excuse for delays".

Why waiting is tempting, and costly. Raposo listed the sources of uncertainty — geopolitical tension, expanding trade restrictions, a worse security environment, fast technological change, more visible climate risks — and noted that they show up in uncertainty indices, energy-price volatility and sovereign yields. She acknowledged that waiting has an option value when an investment is costly to reverse. But she cited recent ECB analysis estimating that an unexpected rise in uncertainty reduces euro area business investment significantly more than output or private consumption, and warned of a collective trap: if firms, households and governments all postpone at the same time, the result is weaker demand, slower innovation and lower potential growth.

Not just a call for public money. Europe's competitiveness problem is "to a significant degree, an investment and financing challenge", Raposo said, but that should not be read as a call for more public spending: governments face ageing, pensions, healthcare, climate and defence costs, fiscal space is limited, and geopolitical tension has already pressured sovereigns. The task is to mobilise public and private resources and allocate them efficiently — with public money where markets miss social value or coordination fails, but without unnecessarily replacing private capital. Resilient banks together with deeper capital markets, including sizeable equity, can span a wider range of risk-return combinations.

Where to invest. Raposo named three areas that pay off in most scenarios: climate and energy resilience, defence and strategic capabilities, and innovation and efficiency. It is hard, she argued, to imagine a plausible future in which Europe does not need more secure energy, stronger digital infrastructure, cybersecurity and a skilled workforce.

Source: Banco de Portugal, Clara Raposo, "Investing through uncertainty – financing Europe's future", closing keynote, Luxembourg, 1 October 2026 (BIS central bankers' speeches) — https://www.bis.org/speeches/20261013-investing-through-uncertainty-financing-europes-future