Anything you can do, I can do better. Hot on the heels of BNP Paribas’ €4.3bn rights issue last week, Société Générale, France’s third-biggest bank, has pulled together its own €4.8bn capital-raising aiming to wriggle free of €3.4bn of expensive French treasury debt and prop up its capital buffer.

This issue has been on the cards for some time but Frédéric Oudéa, SocGen’s chief, has been playing the waiting game. First, he held out for the result of Pittsburgh’s Group of 20 meeting. When firm capital requirements weren’t set, he let BNP jump first into the rights issue swimming pool and test the temperature. The market seemed happy enough with the 30 per cent discount BNP offered, so SocGen tightened the screws to 27 per cent. BNP may have had an advantage in tapping investors first, but SocGen will argue that the lower discount is worth the wait.