The Bank of France published a net loss for 2024 on Wednesday, 7.7 billion euros, as a consequence of the high rates established by the European Central Bank (ECB) last year and despite the help of part of its reserves.
“It is a figure that did not exist in the history of the bank of France,” said his governor François Villeroy de Galhau during a press conference, and that will no longer exist in the predictable future. “
In detail, the banker of France shows an operational loss of 17.9 billion euros compensated up to 10.1 billion euros for compound reserves in the past.
She already accused an operational loss in 2023, of 12.4 billion euros, but then completely compensated for a net gain to zero.
The net loss, which deprives the state of taxes and dividends, is the consequence of “the succession of two episodes of which each of them was highly unlikely and whose sequence was absolutely exceptional,” summarized François Villeroy of Galhau: the COVVI-19 in 2020 and the invasion of Ukraza by Russia two years later.
“The financial situation of the bank of France is solid enough”
These two events, a deflationist for the first and inflationary for the second, led to two very different monetary policies responses, applied by all central banks in the euro zone.
The Bank of France has in a first cycle of low rates bought in turn the bonds of states and companies whose interest is fixed and quite low, of the order of 0.7%, which retains in its balance for years.
But at the same time, the banks of the banks must be compensated at a variable rate, which the ECB fixes the meeting after the meeting, oriented today but that has increased up to 4%.
This is the difference between these two rates that digs the bill for the sidewalk of France.
“The financial situation of the bank of France is solid enough,” insisted François Villeroy de Galhau, who warned that the loss by 2025 would be less and dismissed any need for recapitalization by the state of the shareholders.
The accounts of the German Central Bank were also assigned: on February 25, a historical loss of 19.2 billion euros in 2024, the first since 1979.
Source: BFM TV
