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Coming up to speed...
Mar. 18th, 2013 10:30 pmToday started with four incoming jobs of Routine Stuff™, two of which I translated and returned and two others of which are in the rotation for later. Then I sat down with the third of three reports I accepted last Friday, and made some reasonable progress before it was time for t'ai chi. All in all, it was a 4,500+ target word day.
The developing situation in Cyprus has its instructive points. Over the weekend, it became clear that part of the deal in which Cyprus would get a bailout from the Eurozone involved the "impairment" (sounds a lot less frumpy than "confiscation") of a portion of what depositors had in their accounts, which appears to me to be an ironic way of addressing the issue of government-condoned bank mismanagement, but there you have it.
When this first came to my attention, the maximum "haircut" was 9.9%, which was to be applied to accounts with balances in excess of €100,000 (people with smaller balances would "only" lose about 6% of their balances). Since then, whoever is in charge of this Keystone fire drill has had second thoughts about nailing depositors with sub-€100,000 balances, although stories I've read suggest the "shortfall" is to be made up by increasing the percentage of funds confiscated from depositors with larger balances.
The question in my mind is whether this kind of fallback is really going to work very well, since the cat's been let out of the bag and everyone knows that nobody is immune, really. There's been a lot of speculation that this trick was pulled (for the first time, as a sort of test case) in Cyprus because the island represents a very small percentage of the Eurozone. And maybe, if TPTB had targeted only accounts that "could afford it," the lid could be kept in place (although you have to wonder whether what amounts to stealing money from what are commonly represented as a bunch of Russian oligarchs is a good idea).
By now, anyone who reads the news in Euro countries suffering from government-sponsored financial trouble (which seems to be most of them) is probably wondering whether having money—any amount of money—in a bank is a good idea especially when a bunch of unelected bureaucrats can basically decide to take as much of it as they want, whenever they want, without so much as a by-your-leave.
And there's people who want us to follow the European model? Ye gods.
Cheers...
The developing situation in Cyprus has its instructive points. Over the weekend, it became clear that part of the deal in which Cyprus would get a bailout from the Eurozone involved the "impairment" (sounds a lot less frumpy than "confiscation") of a portion of what depositors had in their accounts, which appears to me to be an ironic way of addressing the issue of government-condoned bank mismanagement, but there you have it.
When this first came to my attention, the maximum "haircut" was 9.9%, which was to be applied to accounts with balances in excess of €100,000 (people with smaller balances would "only" lose about 6% of their balances). Since then, whoever is in charge of this Keystone fire drill has had second thoughts about nailing depositors with sub-€100,000 balances, although stories I've read suggest the "shortfall" is to be made up by increasing the percentage of funds confiscated from depositors with larger balances.
The question in my mind is whether this kind of fallback is really going to work very well, since the cat's been let out of the bag and everyone knows that nobody is immune, really. There's been a lot of speculation that this trick was pulled (for the first time, as a sort of test case) in Cyprus because the island represents a very small percentage of the Eurozone. And maybe, if TPTB had targeted only accounts that "could afford it," the lid could be kept in place (although you have to wonder whether what amounts to stealing money from what are commonly represented as a bunch of Russian oligarchs is a good idea).
By now, anyone who reads the news in Euro countries suffering from government-sponsored financial trouble (which seems to be most of them) is probably wondering whether having money—any amount of money—in a bank is a good idea especially when a bunch of unelected bureaucrats can basically decide to take as much of it as they want, whenever they want, without so much as a by-your-leave.
And there's people who want us to follow the European model? Ye gods.
Cheers...
