OT Never in America?

[harry]

Government to take 10% of everyone's money.

[Home Guy]

(Cyprus deposit confiscation)

Yea, I've been following that on zerohedge since sunday morning.

I reconfigured some forex positions before the pre-market open in Asia on Sunday afternoon, and by sunday evening had made a few thousand dollars.

You can be assured that 99% of Americans have no idea what happened in Syprus - let alone even knowing where it is on a map.

Lots of Russian mafia money tied up in Cyprus - along with civillian money from UK and Germany.

Yea - something like that is probably going to happen in the US about a year from now.

[Bert]

Well, why not?

What's the real difference between the government seizing a chunk of your savings and seizing a chunk of your income?

The various governments have long claimed first dibs on your money and property, if not outright ownership.

[Followups set to something vaguely appropriate]

[Frank]

One of the reasons the founding fathers gave us the 2nd amendment ;)

[willshak]

They already have been doing that for decades every April.

[larrymoencurly]

How did you do when Bernanke planned on driving US interest rates to zero? Prove it. Even PIMCO got that one wrong.

Syrup? Citrus? Old Spice? Sy-ops? Snaggle Puss? Cypress?

Cypress is just another example of why the Euro was a bad idea. Countries adopted the Euro mostly because they were fiscally irresponsible in the first place and didn't want to clamp down on wasteful spending and inflation because of the risks to incumbent politicians. So by switching their currencies to the Euro they essentially handed over their economies to Germany.

[Tim Watts]

On Monday 18 March 2013 18:02 Oren wrote in alt.home.repair:

idUSBRE92G03I20130317

"They" might have, assuming you mean Cyprus.

We (UK) did not get a sodding vote. We had a vote on the EEC in 1975 which was nothing like the EU - and few punters imagined the EU in its present form:

Archbishop Makarios III will be spinning in his grave - still, I suppose they could strap some magnets on him and have an energy export to rival Russian gas.

[Han]

[e-mail] wrote in news:191e490a-e921-46d0-bde6- [e-mail]:

Countries adopted the euro, because the idea of a single currency and no exchange rate fluctuations, banks imposing exchanging fees, etc etc was so persuasive. I really liked being able to travel in Europe (I quite often went from Holland through Belgium to France and Italy) without having to recalculate from Dutch guilders to Belgian franks to French franks and to Italian lire, all being widely different in value.

The problem was that "they" instituted a single currency, but didn't institute similar taxing and economic policies. Some didn't understand the need, others hoped that would automagically follow (yea, big whoop!). Then they admitted other countries to the euro and just plainly believed the books of the authorities in those countries. Now there are problems (big surprise). Countries like Greece and Italy that were used to have their currencies get devalued every so often to make their economy run in tune with the powerful countries like Germany, UK and US, can't do that anymore and now have to come up with the revenue by taxation and economic reforms. And that is painful - no kidding.

Cyprus seems to be an even more special case because it is (it seems) a haven for dubious moneys to get laundered lily-white. Mostly Russian, but there is an excessive amount of UK money (and other countries') as well. That is why they tried to tax "savings", without thinking through the consequences.

We'll see how it all packs out.

[Moe DeLoughan]

In America, we do it in the form of taxpayer subsidies. Per Bloomberg:

. . . what if we told you that, by our calculations, the largest U.S. banks aren?t really profitable at all? What if the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from U.S. taxpayers?

. . . To put the figure in perspective, it?s tantamount to the government giving the banks about 3 cents of every tax dollar collected.

Full article at

[Percival P. Cassidy]

My late parents -- and I wonder how many more Brits beside -- were totally opposed to the Common Market but could not bring themselves to vote for the party that opposed UK membership in the Common Market and kept voting for the party that was in favor of the UK joining. They then kept complaining about Brussels this and Brussels that.

Perce

[Home Guy]

Nah, that's not it.

Every Friday is "Bank Closing Day" in the US.

That's when several black SUV's with tinted windows roll up to a bank on a friday afternoon, and a dozen men in black suits and sunglasses come out, carrying briefcases, and rush into the bank and kick all the customers out. The last guy locks the doors and puts out the "bank closed" sign. The bank may or may not open the following Monday - under a different name.

Accounts over $100k (or is it $250k?) are screwed.

And when the FDIC goes bankrupt, you will experience banking - Cyprus Style.

[Home Guy]

Simple.

I was short USD:CAD

[Home Guy]

Han used improper usenet message-composition style by unnecessarily full-quoting:

The analogy that I've heard goes as follows:

Americans would be pissed if their tax dollars were used to bail out a Texas bank (and by extension the account holders of the bank) that held significant deposits sourced from Mexican drug cartels.

Why were the Cypriot banks going bankrupt?

They seemed to be heavily invested in Greek bonds.

[Home Guy]

That's called a wealth tax. The last time the US gov't tried that was when they confiscated all public gold.

When you vote for the same monkey twice, the one who likes to start expensive wars that ends up destroying your economy, then yea- you have to pay for it one way or another.

[nestork]

The Cypriot parliament is going to vote tomorrow on whether or not to make this money grab "legal". I hope they don't allow it, but if they do, then it shakes the foundation of banking to it's core.

That's because the only reason why we don't all get up early tomorrow morning and go to our banks to get our money out is because we've got confidence that they'll give it back any time we want it. That's because the whole idea behind a bank is that it's a safer place to keep your money than under your mattress or stuffed into a mouse hole in your wall.

But, banks don't keep your money in a safe. Most of the deposits a bank has are invested in long term investments like mortgages and loans. So, everyone wanting their money back at the same time would force any bank into immediate bankruptcy. It's really the trust that our banks will give us our money back if and when we want it that keeps the whole system afloat. Without that trust, the whole system collapses, and we can have a global collapse of the world's banking system tomorrow if everyone wanted their money back tomorrow. And, this Cypriot money grab is exactly the kind of thing that can destory that trust that keeps the banking system afloat.

IF, after tomorrow, anyone ever hears rumour of a similar "Tax on Savings" to be implemented in Greece or Italy or Ireland to finance another bail out for those governments, then every European outside of Germany will be lining up to get their money out of their bank. And, that will cause a run on the European banks, and the near economic collapse of 2008 will be repeated, only this time starting in Europe and spreading to North America instead. North American banks hold bonds issued by other banks, including large European banks like ING and the Royal Bank of Scotland. So if those European banks go bankrupt, their bonds become nearly worthless, and that causes the asset value of North American banks to collapse. That's the way the economic collapse spreads.

I think this Cypriot money grab goes way too far in that it shakes people's confidence in keeping their money "safe", by keeping it in the bank, and breaking that trust is playing with fire. I just hope the Cypriot parliament will realize that when they vote tomorrow.

[harry]

The government they DIDN'T vote for.

[harry]

Heh Heh. That already happened here in the UK.

The Cypriot Banks are all closed 'til Thursday to stop a run on them. Cash machines there were emptied in the first hour after people heard about it.

[pebe]

I think the cause was just normal wear and tear. It occurred before we used a brush on the cleaner. The cleaner's original head was just a suction pad. We changed to a turbo-brush thinking it would cure the problem, but it didn't.

[Kurt Ullman]

Also indicates how far out of touch with reality the honchoes are becoming. I mean, who thought that the best way to help preserve a banking system was to cause a run on that banking system. And this is hardly the first time. (Prior to Lehman's collapse, we had muddled through by patching together good and bad banks and keeping the baseline of too big to fail unknown. When Lehman's was allowed to collapse, we knew and it wasn't all that high. Thus, literally overnight, nobody could trust anybody else and the rest is history. Not an economist so I don't know if this is anything other than fantasy, but it would have been interesting to see.

[Home Guy]

harry used improper usenet message composition style by unnecessarily full-quoting:

If you can withdraw all (or a good portion) of your account savings from an ATM in a single transaction, then you don't have enough wealth in said account to worry about losing 5 or 10% of it.