Overall, French banks have had a good credit crunch. No French institution has had to be rescued by the state. There has been one big bail-out, of Dexia, a Franco-Belgian lender, but France's finance minister, Christine Lagarde, was quick to assert that the bank was in fact Belgian by capital and supervision. France has set aside €40 billion ($52 billion) to boost capital, but only a quarter of that has been requested by banks, a fraction of the sums pumped into American, British and German lenders. And bnp Paribas has emerged as one of the main winners from the crisis. In October it snapped up the Belgian assets of Fortis, a Belgo-Dutch bank, for a bargain price, and became the biggest bank by deposits in the euro zone.
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