Ho appena guardato a caso le aziende di proprietà del governo belga e non sapevo che possedessero Belfius, perché le possiedono?
Mentre siamo in tema di banche di proprietà statale, perché BPOST aveva un dipartimento bancario? Un po ‘strano che un servizio postale funzioni anche come banca.
Anche per una banca di proprietà del governo, sembrano ottenere un punteggio molto basso rispetto a ING e BNP PPF su Fairfin. Il che è assurdo perché investono ancora miliardi in compagnie di combustibili fossili.
di Psy-Demon
6 commenti
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