An Italian for the presidency of the General Society – The Point

An Italian for the presidency of the General Society – The Point

The general company is reorganizing its head. The post of CEO, attended by Frédéric Oudéa since 2009, will be divided into two: the Group boss will keep the CEO function of the institution; but the chair of the board will be entrusted to a third party, the Italian Lorenzo Bini Smaghi. A separation of the functions, as they say in the governance guidelines, which was in the pipes for over a year and that comes from the European directive called CRD IV: the text is supposed to improve regulation of the banking sector indeed recommends strongly to large systemic institutions judged to separate the operational pattern functions and the president of the board (chairman). Governance adopted by almost all the major European banks, but not yet by the General Society, even if it had had this type of organization in 2008-2009, when Daniel Bouton had kept a year in the post of Chairman of the Board Administration after leaving the general direction Frederic Oudéa following the K erviel affair.

In everyday life, this change in governance should not, however, change anything at Societe Generale. Frédéric Oudéa is and remains the group’s boss, who manages and represents the bank of Defense. But still, that’s a stranger to the presidency of the General Society, the first in 150 years of history. With Bini Smaghi, aged 58, Societe Generale was at once the choice of a veteran European affairs and a great connoisseur of the European Central Bank (ECB), enough to fit in with the new landscape bank, now that sector supervision is provided by the Frankfurt Institute. Son of European officials internally France as a teenager, resident of the French School in Brussels and holds a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, the parent of the Liberals, Bini Smaghi has long been an economist at Bank of Italy. Before joining in 1994 the European Monetary Institute, the forerunner of the European Central Bank (ECB), which was preparing the creation of th e euro. And it is logically that in 2005 it became one of the six members of the ECB Executive Board. – The body that manages the day the Central Bank and seat alongside national governors at the monetary policy meetings

Known for his outspokenness

A mandate he had to resign in late 2011 after much political pressure, starting with those of Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy: following the appointment of Italian Mario Draghi as President of the ECB instead of Jean-Claude Trichet, Bini Smaghi had indeed been asked to make way to enable France to have even one member to the Executive Board of the ECB – it will made with the appointment of Benoît Coeuré. French perfectly, Bini Smaghi taught since at Harvard and also ran a regular column in the Financial Times .

Known already for his outspokenness when he sat on the ECB under the chairmanship Trichet, at a time when the communication of the Central Bank was extremely locked, he defended recent years opinions down official positions of the European institutions. As when he blasted the austerity policies in Europe in a book called Austerity, European Democracies against the wall . Or withdrawn in late 2011 just before leaving the ECB, “quasi-religious discussions in Europe about the quantitative easing,” the public debt repurchase by the central bank; he was then expressed support for such an instrument, used at the time by the United States and England, but then caused fierce debate within the euro area. Little wink, it is precisely this Thursday, three days after the appointment of Bini Smaghi to the presidency of the General Society, the ECB must announce launch its own quantitative easing, the ultimate weapon against the risk of deflation.