FRANCE LE BIG BANG
France's capital markets, for long among the most regulated in the world, are at last being exposed to international competition. Banks, brokers, and industrial corporations are leaving the protective umbrella of state administration.
The Finance Ministry has proposed new markets in certificates of deposit, treasury bonds, commercial paper, and futures; and it is replacing the system of government-set lending limits with the notion of free money markets. It's even nibbling away at the currency controls that have frightened away international investors, and it has set in train a reorganization of the bourse (stock exchange) opening up to banks what has traditionally been the preserve of a comfortable coterie of agents de change (brokers).
The most dramatic change will be the denationalization of the state-owned corporations. They were supposed to be the showpieces of President Francois Mitterrand's new socialist government, when it was elected in 1981. The 33 banks and seven industrial corporations (Pechiney, Thomson, Rhone-Poulenc, St Gobain, CGE, CII Bull, and CGCT) which were bought by the state were proof of a grand change in France's industrial, financial and social strategy.
President Mitterrand himself referred to the new state-owned groups as "the tools of the next century'; Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy called it "the drawn of a new era'.