2. Calls on the Member States’ ministers for employment and social affairs to agree on a Council recommendation during the EPSCO Council in February 2013 aimed at implementing Youth Guarantee schemes in all Member States; emphasises that the Youth Guarantee is not a job guarantee but an instrument ensuring that all young EU citizens and legal residents up to the age of 25 years, and recent graduates under 30, receive a good-quality offer of employment, continued education or apprenticeship within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education; stresses that Youth Guarantee schemes should effectively improve the situatio ...[+++]n of NEETs; underlines that Youth Guarantee schemes should be eligible for specific forms of European funding, especially in the Member States with the highest youth unemployment rates;

5. Welcomes the observations provided by ECA in its Special Report No 4/2011 on the SME Guarantee facility; calls on the European Investment Fund, which manages the facility on behalf of the Commission, to implement the ECA’s recommendations as soon as possible; notes the observations of the ECA published in its Special Report 4/2011 on the audit of the SMEG facility with regard to the scarcity of factual evidence presented in the impact assessment in support of the facility, the unclear objectives of the scheme, the lack of specific targets and the cases where beneficiaries could have obtained loans on the market without publicly supported guarantees; welcome ...[+++]s, at the same time, the achievements identified in the Special Report 4/2011, including the establishment of an appropriate management framework as well as a well-designed framework for selection of beneficiaries, and the introduction of clear and reasonable reporting requirements that do not impose an excessive burden on SMEs;

We simply cannot live with a system where many of the market players operate across a number of countries without deposit-guarantee arrangements that are at least harmonised or based on common principles, in the interests not only of competition by also of public confidence in market mechanisms.

The sound market practice favoured by regulators where participants in the financial market use top-up collateral arrangements to manage and limit their credit risk to each other by mark-to-market calculations of the current market value of the credit exposure and the value of the collateral and accordingly ask for top-up collateral or return the surplus of collateral should be protected.

The sound market practice favoured by regulators where participants in the financial market use top-up collateral arrangements to manage and limit their credit risk to each other by mark-to-market calculations of the current market value of the credit exposure and the value of the collateral and accordingly ask for top-up collateral or return the surplus of collateral should be protected.

The SME Guarantee Facility will provide cross-guarantees or, where appropriate, co-guarantees for guarantee schemes operating in Member States, and direct guarantees in the case of the EIB or any other appropriate financial intermediary, its losses from the relevant guarantees being covered by the general budget of the European Union.