France Doesn't Need Bank Consolidation

As the world watches to see if Emmanuel Macron succeeds in shaking France out of its statist torpor, it should bear in mind that he would first need to somehow bypass the country’s entrenched mandarins, the elite-educated cadre that run France's most important bureaucracies and whose cohorts tend to have leadership roles throughout French industry; they often have the biggest stake in the status quo. A case in point is banking.

François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of the Bank of France, argued in a little-noticed end-of-year speech that "Europe still suffers from excess banking capacity, and cross-border consolidation is necessary." In the United States, the top five banks have about 40 percent market share; in Europe it's barely 20 percent, he noted.