Per Dexia risultati peggiori delle attese, ma vorrei un commento dai più esperti, perchè se con questa perdita si chiude la partita FSA allora forse siamo fuori dal tunnel
Dexia Posts Record EU2.6 Billion Fourth-Quarter Loss (Update1)
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By John Martens and Fabio Benedetti-Valentini
Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) --
Dexia SA, the world’s largest lender to local governments, reported a record fourth-quarter loss on the sale of its U.S. bond insurance unit and provisions for declines in the value of mortgage-backed securities.
The
loss of 2.6 billion euros ($3.31 billion) compares with net income of 587 million euros a year earlier, the Paris- and Brussels-based company said in an e-mailed statement today. That was more than the 2.3 billion-euro loss it estimated last month.
Dexia, which got a 6.4 billion-euro lifeline from France, Belgium and Luxembourg last September to avert a collapse, is among the worst-hit European banks following the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer
Pierre Mariani agreed in November to sell the unprofitable U.S. bond- insurance unit to Assured Guaranty Ltd. for $722 million and pledged to slash costs by 15 percent over three years.
“The results are evidence of the magnitude of a truly exceptional crisis and of the structural fragility developed in Dexia over recent years,” Mariani said in the statement. “Refocused on its core business lines, Dexia is in a position to regain the path to profitability.”
The bank is cutting 900 jobs, or about 3 percent of its staff, to save 200 million euros in 2009, Dexia said Jan. 30. It reiterated a plan to triple cost savings over three years while focusing on public finance and stopping proprietary trading.
Dexia has said it won’t pay a
dividend or bonuses to top managers for 2008 after posting a full-year net loss of 3 billion euros.
Salary Cuts
The bank’s board
members will have their salary cut 50 percent this year as part of the cost-cutting plan and ways of attributing bonuses within the company will be rethought, Mariani said last month.
Dexia has fallen 46 percent this year, cutting the bank’s value to 3.03 billion euros.
Dexia will take less risk in its trading activities and concentrate them in Brussels and Dublin. The bank will stop public finance operations in Australia, Eastern Europe, Mexico and Scandinavia and reduce lending to local governments in the U.K. and the U.S. The Slovakian unit will be kept as well as public finance
operations in Italy and Iberia.
The French-Belgian lender is facing an increased cost of funding after the bankruptcy of Lehman froze credit markets.
Dexia had to accept state guarantees on borrowings with a maturity of up to three years to fund its lending activities.
The Tier 1 ratio, a key indicator of financial strength, stood at 10.6 percent at the end of December.
FSA Sale
The bond-insurance unit, Financial Security Assurance Inc., contributed 2.03 billion euros to the fourth-quarter loss. In addition, Dexia had 1.2 billion euros of provisions and writedowns related to the financial crisis, the bank said Jan. 30. The bank still plans to complete the sale of the bond insurer at the beginning of the second quarter.
Dexia agreed to sell FSA’s insured portfolio of $425 billion, including $110 billion of asset-backed securities, to Assured Guaranty, the bond insurer backed by billionaire
Wilbur Ross. Dexia agreed to cover losses of as much as $4.5 billion on FSA’s $16.5 billion financial products portfolio, which includes subprime mortgage-backed securities.
FSA’s financial-products portfolio is excluded from the Assured Guaranty deal. Dexia said Nov. 14 it will cover losses of as much as $3.1 billion from that unit on top of the $1.4 billion provisioned by Sept. 30. The French and Belgian states will guarantee the unit’s assets.