French banks: exit risks - FT.com It's not just bankers being beheaded these days. Processes and structures are for the chop, too. Marcus Agius, Barclays chairman, resigned on Monday following a scandal over interest rate manipulation, the latest in a litany of misjudgments and bad management at UK banks. French banks, meanwhile, have more prosaic problems. After last year's dollar funding squeeze and last month's downgrade by Moody's, BNP Paribas is considering booking specialised lending to Italy and Spain via its Belgian operation. And Crédit Agricole could make a Greek exit of its own - slipping away from its Emporiki Bank unit. These moves highlight two things: funding is tough in the eurozone, even for a BNP Paribas; and the pro-cyclical coincidence of Basel III and the eurozone crisis are prompting desperate-looking actions. The crazy thing is that the banks" responses are both prudent. But their timing is insensitive in the circumstances. By shifting Spanish export and project finance loans to Belgium to close a funding gap put at €20bn by Bloomberg, BNP is merely tapping the deep pools of liquidity acquired in its 2009 purchase of Fortis Bank. So deep that Brussels is its funding hub for specialised corporate lending. With no retail base in Spain, the shift makes sense. In Italy, it can at least tap the growing retail deposit base of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. Meanwhile, talk of a Crédit Agricole retreat from Greece is not new. But a bank owned by French farmers should never have lavished €3.3bn to buy the Greek bank in the first place. Exiting now, however, is systemically risky. Crédit Agricole should know better: it has already had to take Emporiki's operations in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania under direct control. No wonder, given Greek depositor nerves, that National Bank of Greece has quickly said it is in talks to buy Emporiki. The French banks should have acted ages ago, and not now, when talk of their action feeds uncertainty. Barclays, by contrast, may wish it had not been the first to move.