It’s almost habit-forming. Every few years, the governments of Belgium, France and Luxembourg gather around a table to thrash out how to save a crippled regional financial services group. Fortis, Dexia and, following last month’s collapse, Dexia again. Initially, they made good progress, agreeing the sale of its Luxembourg private bank, its Belgian retail bank and its municipal lending arm. HSBC could buy its Turkish retail bank. Now the three-way charade appears to be boiling down to a dispute over government debt guarantees.

Dexia is a clear casualty of the eurozone’s unresolved debt crisis, which has squeezed bank funding. So far, it has been kept on life support by the Belgian central bank, which has provided perhaps €40bn of liquidity (and rising). Its funding is not the biggest issue, however. It is the wider risk to the eurozone members’ sovereign credit ratings. For Belgium, on the hook for 60.5 per cent of the guarantee, its potential €55bn liability equates to 15 per cent of gross domestic product. No wonder the yield on Belgian 10-year government bonds surged to 5.5 per cent on Wednesday. Put another way, its 340 basis point spread over Bunds is the widest in the euro era.

France, meanwhile, is down for 30.5 per cent of the guarantee, or about 1.7 per cent of French GDP. But there are ominous rumblings from Moody’s Investors Service in the background that France could lose its triple A rating if its liability to the European Financial Stability Facility rose, or it had to support French banks. The yield on France’s 10-year debt rose to 3.7 per cent.