[The Independent, U.K.]
Libération, France
French Banks Shouldn't
Act Like Goldman Sachs
"Like
Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas is extremely profitable, but do its profits and bonuses
benefit the real economy?"
By François Sergent
Translated By
Sandrine Ageorges
August 7, 2009
France - Liberation - Original Article (French)
Writing about the banks on Wall
Street, Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman could have been talking about
BNP Paribas in France.
"The American
economy remains in dire straits," he wrote, "Yet Goldman Sachs
just reported record quarterly profits - and it’s preparing to hand out huge
bonuses …this tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does.
Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America."
Like Goldman
Sachs, BNP Paribas is extremely profitable. But do its profits and bonuses
benefit the real economy? We know the crisis is largely due to the "financialization"
of the economy, which has been transformed into a casino without any connection
to the creation of wealth. Everything has become a financial product of benefit
only to banks and traders.
The bonuses, as they are calculated,
maintain this economic fiction. And they do so without risk, since the state
stands behind them in case of any problems.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
A good portion of the much trumpeted
gains claimed by BNP Paribas come from Fortis, a Belgian bank purchased on the
cheap. So when BNP Paribas realizes its profit growth, the Belgian as well as the
French taxpayer are the losers.
Today the head of BNP Paribas
said to wants, "to wait until the end of 2010 to decide on repaying state-provided
assistance." Is this a question of some audacious formula he intends to
offer clients who, like him, are having difficulty scheduling their loan
payments? Rather than reward these traders who have become bounty hunters, wouldn’t
it be better to use these reserves to reimburse the French who saved BNP
Paribas when everything was going wrong?
CLICK HERE FOR FRENCH VERSION
[Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US August 12, 6:20pm]
