Basel III will add even more the cost of liquidity

Basel III will add even more the cost of liquidity. How will you pass the

Société Générale has anticipated the change and will be of Basel III. The issue of this reform is to ensure the soundness of the financial sector while allowing banks to continue their mission of financing of the economy. Amounts to identify for respect them are considerable, which will require a profound transformation of the financial industry.

For what we are, we reason already on two new ratios applicable liquidity by 2015 and in 2018. Some activities, such as for example comfort ("back up") of liquidity lines granted to businesses, will become more expensive here. Liquidity ratios, they are considered as used on the first day in full. We must therefore refinance them at their grant and charge them the actual cost and the cost more only insurance. Companies should take into account that, to have a "back up" line, they will have to accept the award, which will be the one that we invoice the market. It should be noted that the system is in place might push to increase the cost of financing of the economy. I hope that the recent remarks of French and German regulators on wrong sizing of these ratios will be followed by effect and reduce the cost.

In this regard, the French banks and their customers are particularly badly off, with a ratio of short-term liquidity around 44, half below the world average

I do not confirm these figures, but it is a fact, based on this method of calculation, the French banks are apparently less than their foreign competitors while they withstood the crisis particularly well! This reflects the difficulty to grasp the strength of a banking system through simple ratios. We are less well placed for three reasons: tax niche of life insurance, which drains most of the savings of individuals from bank balance sheets, the appetite of our customers for the monetary Sicav, which, again, private us savings in the short term in the monetary Sicav deposits, and, finally, the importance of a long mortgage rates fixed in our jobs.

What are the options which you are working

The Bank strives to control the size of its balance sheet, to improve the structure of its refinancing and to assess its activities on the basis of the essential criterion of scarce resources, including liquidity demand. It seems to us, on the other hand, need to think about new savings products that would improve our ability to capture the medium and long term savings and rebalancing the respective shares of life insurance and bank balance sheets.

This could go through a war of compensation of deposits

No, I think not, and indeed, by definition, this cannot solve a problem which is a systemic problem, but should work on all the levers. We have hired voluntarist decreased, the order of 10 points per year, our overall ratio of credit on deposits in looking for deposits to partly finance our development since last year.

In the conflict on the sharing of the resources of the Livret A, between banks and the Caisse des Dépôts, increase the ceiling of deposits, as Credit Agricole suggests, would be a modus vivendi

This is going in the right direction, but would not fundamentally change things. The law passed three years ago provided many guarantees for the financing of social housing, with a threshold of over-coverage of 125 of needs. Debate of the centralization of the booklet, but the subject is the centralization of the sustainable development booklet (LDD), which rate is low because we pay almost all of these resources to SMEs. If there is the overall rate of centralization, that is to centralize the sum which it has already loaned to small businesses. It would be a second brake to credit. The funds collected by the title of A booklet and the LDD banks must and can contribute both to the financing of social housing and TPE - SMEs, by finding a balance not penalising the distribution of credit.

What do you propose

There is a period of longer convergence of fifteen or twenty years and why not two separate centralization rates.