Coverage, like the one below (via Scanned Retina blog), is diluted for US audiences.
Elsewhere the story is told more or less along the following lines:
Cyprus is a tiny nation, with notoriously corrupt banking system, where the Russian mafia and CIA drug trafficking moneys happily mingle.... Cyprus is also part of the Eurozone, not necessarily by merit, but to spite Turkey. With the centralized Eurozone banking regulation, banking risks were imposed on the People of Europe with inadequate enforcement to match (surprise, surprise).
Predictably, following the huge success of the show in its US run, the Cypriot banks also ran in recent years the made-in-the-USA real estate bubble banking scheme, risky mortgages, etc. At Euro 17 billions, the Cyprus banking bailout is about 1 GDP and considered huge [By comparison, the too-big-to-fail United States has bailed out the banks for much more the 1 GDP, many times over, if risky derivatives, now backed by the taxpayer are accounted]
Based on the fundamental principles of natural justice about 2/3 of the Cyprus banking bailout moneys will be borne by the People of other nations of the Eurozone, and a third of bailout moneys will be borne by the People of Cyprus through the levy on small, insured depositors. The large gamblers, the uninsured, big depositors will not share the same burden.
In a tiny nation like Cyprus, the Robber Barons don't bother to complicate the script by incomprehensible acronyms like TARP, and they don't bother to fake TARP Oversight Board and TARP Inspector General, congressional hearings, Fraud Enforcement Enhancement Act, etc, etc... They just rob the People in broad daylight...
jz
P.S. The made-in-the-USA real estate bubble banking scheme, is not new either, it is a repeat of the "railroad
farm mortgage crisis" of 1857, at the onset of the US Robber Baron Era.
Cypriots Bemoan Bailout Deal's Bank Deposit Levy
By MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS 03/16/13 02:51 PM ET EDT ![AP]()
NICOSIA, Cyprus — Cyprus' president said Saturday that the decision to force bank depositors to share the burden of a (EURO)10 billion ($13 billion) bailout package from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund was done to save his country from financial ruin.
Despite that assurance, nervous depositors rushed to ATM machines in Cyprus on Saturday to drain their accounts.
President Nicos Anastasiades said Cyprus had little option but to accept the bailout deal, which imposes a levy on the country's bank deposits – an unprecedented step in the eurozone crisis. Without it, he said, Cyprus' banking system would have collapsed on Tuesday.
Anastasiades said that's when the European Central Bank would have stopped providing emergency funding to Cyprus' troubled banks. Such a collapse would have driven the country to bankruptcy and possibly out of the eurozone, he said.
The president said the deposit levy rescues banks, keeps the country's debt load manageable, and avoids the risk of deeper pay cuts and tax hikes.
"We're not aiming to gloss over the situation," he said in his first public statement after the EU-IMF meeting in Brussels agreed on the bailout early Saturday. "The solution taken may be painful, but it was the only one" worth taking.
News of the levy stunned the public because Anastasiades and his top ministers had vehemently rejected any suggestions of going after deposits to save Cyprus' banks that lost billions on bad Greek debt.
Lines formed at many ATMs as people scrambled to pull as much of their money out as they could, a development that Cypriot and European officials feared would happen. Another key concern was that the bailout would buckle investor confidence in Cyprus and other weaker eurozone economies.
Trying to head off a full-blown bank run when banks reopen on Tuesday after the long holiday weekend, Bank of Cyprus Group chief Andreas Artemis called for "calm and a level-headed assessment" of the situation.
