The bailout has begun. This time, the govt is saving the deposit banking op ...
Belgium to Buy Dexia’s Consumer Unit for $5.4B
Belgium agreed to buy the local consumer-lending unit of Dexia SA (DEXB), ending a 15-year cross-border experiment with France after the European debt crisis deepened.
The Belgian federal government will pay 4 billion euros ($5.4 billion) for the division and guarantee 60 percent of a so-called bad bank to be set up for Dexia’s troubled assets, Finance Minister Didier Reynders said at a press conference today in Brussels.
The dismantling of Dexia, once the world’s leading lender to municipalities, became inevitable after concern over European sovereign debt holdings caused its short-term funding to evaporate. Dexia’s breakup, three months after it got a clean bill of health in European Union stress tests, brought the region’s banking crisis from the continent’s periphery to its center.
“Dexia is not an isolated problem,” said Cor Kluis, an Utrecht, Netherlands-based analyst at Rabobank International who rates Dexia “reduce.” “The question for all investors in Europe is how politicians are going to handle this, and what they want to see is a coordinated and professional solution. That would be a good opportunity to restore calm.”