From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/economy/hell-breaks-loose-europe-banking-crisis-unfolds-depositors-money-may-be-seized
In Cyprus, money deposited safely in banks will likely be seized and used to “bail in” the country.
By Edward Harrison
March 17, 2013
Editor’s Note: The deposit grab will not offiically happen until parliament meets. A vote schedueled for Sunday has been delayed until Monday.
Saturday morning we learned that after hours of tense negotiation, Europe has hammered out a 10bn euro “bailout” of Cyprus. I put the term bailout in quotes because the key feature of this deal is the bail-in of Cypriot depositors to the tune of 5.8bn euros, about a third of Cyprus’ GDP. This means that depositors went to sleep on Friday night and woke up Saturday to find that their money, deposited safely in Cypriot banks, had been seized and used to “bail out” the country. While the bail-in became official EU bank rescue policy during the Spanish crisis last summer, bank depositors were never mentioned at that time. I see this as an extreme measure which, if the European banking crisis continues elsewhere, will have very negative implications for bank depositor confidence in other European periphery countries.
The mitigating factor in terms of preventing a loss of confidence in the European banking system is that the bail-in will happen principally via a one-time 9.9% levy on deposits over 100,000 euros. This is a bank holiday measure that means that Cypriot bank account holders with funds over 100,000 euros will have 9.9% of their account holdings deducted from their accounts when banks open on Tuesday. However, importantly, an additional 6.75% levy is going to hit deposits below that 100,000 euro level. As a bank depositor, given a one-day national holiday to decide what to do with your now shrunken savings, what would you do?
Cyprus’ finance minister Michalis Sarris said large deposit withdrawals would be banned. Jörg Asmussen, a German member of the ECB board and a key ally of Angela Merkel, added that the part of the deposit base equivalent to the actual bail-in levies would be frozen immediately so the funds could be used to pay for the “bailout”. The Financial Times has the best immediate write-up on this. The finance minister is quoted this way in that article:
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/hell-breaks-loose-europe-banking-crisis-unfolds-depositors-money-may-be-seized
Also:
Guardian UK: Cyprus bailout: ‘people are panicking, they’re afraid of losing their money’
