BNP Paribas Rights Issue

The Wall Street Journal, link, reports this evening:

What a difference six weeks makes.

Back in August, BNP Paribas said it wouldn't repay the French government's €5.1 billion ($8.1 billion) stake in the bank until at least early 2010. Now it is launching a €4.3 billion rights issue to do just that -- in the process leapfrogging a clutch of other European banks, including Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, mulling similar efforts to repay government aid, and Unicredit, which announced a rights issue later Tuesday.

Watch for developments in the Lloyds HBOS and RBS Asset Protection Scheme saga as the next stage of the credit crunch looks set to hit removing the world from the relative calm of the phony recession.

Read John Redwood on Quantitative Easing from here.

Returning value to money is the only cure, everything attempted over the past 25 months has been working in exactly the wrong direction.