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"The French banking industry is probably the safest in Europe in terms of cost of risk and quality of assets" |
In the month the sovereign debt crisis briefly came home to core Europe, a senior French banker had a surprise message.
"I would say that the French banking industry is probably the safest in Europe in terms of cost of risk and quality of assets," says Séverin Cabannes, deputy chief executive of Société Générale.
That’s a bold statement to make at the best of times. Making it at the moment when your shares are suspended in early trading on the Paris Stock Exchange sounds positively swashbuckling. Cabannes was speaking to Euromoney soon after the release of Société Générale’s second-quarter results in August. These indicated that group net income in the period under review had fallen by 31% to €747 million.
The brief suspension in Société Générale share trading was occasioned not by the results themselves, however, but by a statement that accompanied them. This warned that "the group net income target of €6 billion in 2012 now appears difficult to achieve within the scheduled timeframe".