BRUSSELS (MNI) – Dexia’s troubled assets are not of poor quality
but are too-long dated to refinance under current market conditions,
European Central Bank Governing Council member Luc Coene said Wednesday.
“The problem with Dexia’s assests is not a problem of quality, it
is a problem of duration,” Luc Coene, who is governor of the Belgian
National Bank, told the Belgian Federal Parliament’s Finance Committee.
“Their duration is so long that they cannot be financed under
current market conditions,” said Coene.
“The majority of assets in Dexia’s portfolio does not have
fundamental problems,” the central bank governor said.
Holding these assets to maturity will, therefore, likely not result
in losses, he said.
Belgian and French authorities are working on a deal to carve up
the group into French and Belgian entities and are also looking to place
Dexia’s troubled assets in a ‘bad bank’ to protect the strong units.
Problems with the bank’s business model became apparent in 2008
when the liquidity crunch that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers
laid bare Dexia’s over-dependence on short term funding to finance its
long-term lending activities to municipal governments.
Dexia became the first major bank casualty of the Eurozone’s
sovereign debt crisis when the world’s largest lender to municipalities
found itself shunned by other banks in funding markets because of
concerns about the group’s large holdings of Greek government bonds.
Under the control of the French and Belgian states since 2008,
Dexia earlier this month was forced to seek further state guarantees
after a ratings downgrade by Moody’s and Standard and Poors’ triggered
significant withdrawals.
–Brussels bureau: +324-9522-8374; pkoh@marketnews.com
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