Ich habe nur nach dem Zufallsprinzip Unternehmen der belgischen Regierung angesehen und wusste nicht, dass sie Belfius besaßen. Warum besitzen sie sie?
Warum hatte BPOST eine Bankabteilung, während wir uns zum Thema staatliche Banken befinden? Ein bisschen seltsam für einen Postdienst, der auch als Bank arbeitet.
Auch für eine Bank, die der Regierung gehört, scheinen sie im Vergleich zu ING und BNP PPF auf Fairfin wirklich niedrig zu punkten. Dies ist absurd, weil sie immer noch Milliarden in Unternehmen mit fossilen Brennständen investieren.
Von Psy-Demon
11 Kommentare
Socialisation of losses
The government bought it in 2008 during the global financial crisis, when Dexia bank was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Afterwards it was renamed to Belfius.
Belfius was originally founded to make it easy for communes to get easy access to loans, which lead to them being major stakeholders of the bank throughout the decades. Due to this, with the financial crisis of 2008, it was an important target to save and the government took it over completely.
BPost used to have a banking branch because the government more than 100 years ago wanted to make it easy for normal people to save money. From there on, it grew bigger.
In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, Belfius was almost bankrupt. They held a lot of savings and loans and their bankruptcy would have disrupted the Belgian banking sector and maybe even caused a crises for all EU banks (trust issues etc). So Belgium bought them, effectively financing a private company with taxpayers money.
I think this is the famous story with the bad bank and the good bank, where they subdivided the old Belfius into a good bank (financially ok) and a bad bank, a firm holding all terrible investments and worthless assets. The Belfius of today is that good bank.
The postal bank is older. I think this stems from the postal service dealing out everybody’s pension check, but I honestly have no idea.
Bank crisis in 2008. They bought it, so it wouldn’t go bankrupt.
Bpost has a vast network, so postoffice/bank isn’t a bad idea. It also happens in other nations. Also Bpost used to pay pensions and pay you if the federal government returns money to you and they don’t have your bank account number. So there were a lot of large financial transactions that went through Bpost, so them also offering banking isn’t that strange tbh.
bpost has been working with money since before your grandmother was born.
Paying out pensions at home; issuing and cashing „assignaties“ (a variant of a cheque).
If you needed to make a deposit and didn’t want to use a bank transfer, you could go to a postoffice, give cash and they would deposit it on any bank. Which was convenient if you were late te pay as their postal stamp was the offical date of payment. So that was like a form of instant transfer.
When they had their accounts, they couldn’t join bancontact network as they were not a bank; so they developed their postomat for payments in shops and cash withdrawls
In 2008 during the great financial crisis Dexia was about to go under. The Belgian govt bailed it out. Up until 2012 they were offering homes loans at about 1.75%, to draw more customers.
BTW befius was not the only bank to have been bailed out. Fortis , abn amro & a few more received help from the government.
Bpost has been there forever. Guess the govt needed to book some profits hence sold it off to bnp paribas.
A lot off countries have a postal bank ie : UK, Swiss etc.
Its normal.
Because:
BELgium FInances US
You know that the Belgian government also has partial ownership in BNP Paribas, right ?
The reason why the belgian state has ownership in those banks is very simple : Dividends help pay for the government spendings.
Another reason is that some strategic companies need (partial) state ownership just in case…
But to answer your question about Belfius : When Dexia crashed in ’08, the company still had some healthy assets. The Belgian state bailed the bank out by buying the helthy assets and get rid of the toxic ones. It saved a lot of jobs that would have been lost in case of bankrupcy. The healthy assets still had a market value that could be salvaged and serve as basis to rebuild a healthy company.
Because Dexia nearly collapsed following the subprime crisis in 2008, so the state bailed it out and took ownership. It was the best option, especially in hindsight.
>A bit strange for a postal service to also work as a bank.
It actually ***isn’t***. Post offices act as one of the places money orders and bank transfers could be initiated for decades, and have always been helpful for smaller communities where a bank branch might not be readily accessible.