The bankers' flight back
With some of France's best legal and economic minds at its disposal, President François Mitterrand's Socialist Party had a full decade to plot how to fulfill a key campaign promise: the nationalization of major industries and private banks. Yet by the time the National Assembly approved the first batch of takeovers last week, 332 to 154, capitalists had found an embarrassingly gaping hole in Mitterrand's plan and put one of French banking's most glittering prizes out of reach of the Socialists.
At issue was the future of the second largest bank on Mitterrand's hit list, the dynamic Compagnie Financière...
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