Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Mohamed A. El-Erian said organizations such as the International Monetary Fund need to act now with European banks being at risk of being engulfed in the region’s sovereign debt crisis.

“We’re getting close to a full-blown banking crisis in Europe,” El-Erian, Pimco’s chief executive officer and co-chief investment officer, said in a radio interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt.

BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest lender, was forced to deny an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today that cited an unidentified official as saying the bank could no longer borrow in dollars.

French banks are in the spotlight because of their holdings of bonds issued by the euro region’s most-indebted nations, topping the list of Greek creditors with $56.7 billion in overall exposure, according to a June report by the Bank for International Settlements.