Dear members, dear treasury professionals, dear partners, dear friends,

Once again we meet together for the traditional year end ATEB cocktail party. The ATEB Board is happy to have you here. This is a good opportunity to look back at 2008 and to give you some indications about the ATEB strategy for 2009.

Let us start with 2008… well I’m sure we all would like the financial crisis not to have happened! On the other hand it is something none of us has ever experienced and we all got a real life chance to test various stress scenarios. Hopefully we will learn from what happened.

Allow me a few thoughts: generally, the overall response of the political establishment to the events has been very dynamic and appropriate, quite surprisingly so. But despite all insurances most banks are still reluctant to resume business with their customers and this is extremely dangerous because this attitude accelerates the economic downturn. Moreover, some banks are taking an unfair advantage from this crisis by pushing spreads up to unacceptable levels.
So far, nobody has been able to explain to me why most banks do not resume lending as they get monies almost for free from the Central Banks. They obviously prefer depositing in the evening, at a lower rate, the monies they borrowed in the morning with the same ECB. Almost 200bn € per day….50 basis points a day…..the ECB will have no problem whatsoever to finance its new Frankfurt building!

But now comes the time of the blame game when politicians and the public at large are looking for scapegoats. Rating agencies are under severe criticism, hedge funds, regulators…..and bank top managers of course.

Regulation seems to be the easiest route to take; some of you may remember Commissioner McCreevy addressing us two years ago when he spoke about his intention to “regulate better as opposed to regulate more” in the banking sector. We couldn’t have agreed more. What happened, did he fail? Would regulation have helped us to prevent the tsunami coming from the US? I remember participating in a think thank on Basel II three years ago where a senior US regulator said that the US would not implement the overly onerous Basel II rules except for the 10 biggest US banks. He said they did not need them because they had learned from the Savings and Loans crisis in the early 90ies and their oversight, especially of the mortgage market, is very accurate and solid! No joke! 
This shows clearly that human beings do have a remarkable capacity of forgetting what went wrong in the past. Oblivion and greed is a tricky combination. Can regulation help? Shouldn’t we rather go for new performance indicators for our companies? There are enormous challenges ahead related to the preservation of our planet. This crisis should not distract us from the real risk we are facing if we want our grandchildren to enjoy a decent life.

This was the philosophical minute! Back to ATEB;

What has ATEB done for its members in 2008: we have organized a number of events, 14 I believe have come through; 3 had to be postponed due to too low level of interest. The annual conference was again great success, and mainly thanks to Jef, and of course thanks to all the contributors, sponsors and speakers, the ATEB Board, not to mention Christine and Luc our web master. Let me thank them all. We already almost have the sponsors for next year but we are most happy to receive any offer of partnership for 2009. I would like to particularly thank Philippe de Clippele and Philippe Vincke for their commitment to ATEB: the Tax for Treasurers cycle has been extremely successful and of very high quality. We will send to the members a very short questionnaire aiming at assessing whether we should continue the cycle in 2009 and if yes which topics you would like PwC to tackle. My personal thanks to Patrick who has monitored the cycle on behalf of ATEB.
Now back to the future! What can ATEB do for you in 2009? Well we will continue offering you about one event per month. Here are the subjects that we selected (show ppt. presentation). As you can see we only scheduled the events until June. In April we will organize the second part of the year; so if you have any ideas, subjects please let us know. I think I’ve spoken enough by now! Let me wish you all the best for the end of the year and invite you to open the walking dinner. Enjoy! Long life to you all and to ATEB!

Olivier
December 15th, 2008