Banks, dividends, sifs

Last week I was reading that it is almost a consensus among the analysts that no german bank is going to pay dividends in spring 2009. Even more, some of them might try to raise additional capital from shareholders (e.g. postbank and commerzbank). Also the insurers might cut partially the dividends (for sure allianz, not so sure munchener re).

What if scenario ... what if austrian and french banks are going to do the same? It looks like it is more and more probable that sifs will not cash anymore next year the generous dividends from BCR and BRD, which were the biggest part of their regular income. Without bank dividends and without selling any participations, the sifs will run out of cash next year. And for sure 2009 will not be a good year for fire selling minority participations. Maybe Dinel Staicu, Chelu and Fercala are focused now on their power fights, and they do not see the tsunami coming. That reminds me of something Giovani Becali was saying 2 days ago about Gigi Becali: "he is rich as he was till now, but he just has currently no cash :)". I hope we will not say next year about sifs - they owe 5% of the romanian banking system, but they cannot cover their operating costs.

PS. One more thing about banks: Allianz and Commerzbank renegociated last week their initial sale agreement regarding DresdnerBank. The total transaction amounts now only 5 billion euro (down from 10) and still the biggest chunk of it are Commerzbank shares and not cash. The only improvement is that the transaction will be done in one step and not in 2 steps as planned, avoiding a capital raise, which would have been hard to digest for the Commerzbank shareholders. The numbers used by sifs or analysts when evaluating TLV or BCR must be strongly adjusted. 6 billion euro for BCR or 1 billion euro for TLV are fairy-tales from past times.