Zero Euro Bill Yeah, some things in life are inevitable. That's why it was no surprise, though still endlessly amusing, to find that while depositors of Laiki Bank (aka Cyprus Popular Bank) on the island itself have been unable to get to their money for 10 days now, Laiki's 4 branches in the UK have all that time simply remained open for business. Which also means that richer clients in Cyprus will lose between 40% and 100% of their savings
Read More...Over the past week, Europe, or rather the present EU leadership, has done damage to itself it will never be able to repair. It seems to escape everbody, but that doesn't make it any less true: people from Portugal to Spain to Italy to Greece to Cyprus and Ireland are worse off today than they were when they first adopted the euro. Moreover, their economies are all getting worse as we speak and projected to plunge further. The once highly
Read More...Walter Crane Pandora Opens The Box 1892 One day after it was agreed on and announced by the Eurogroup and Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades, the deal that would turn the Eurozone into a Pandora's box like no other EU measure to date has done looks like it may never reach the finish line. The Cypriot parliament, in which freshly elected Anastasiades holds just 20 of 56 seats, has pushed a vote on the deal forward until Monday, a clear sign
Read More...Overnight last night, the Eurogroup (Eurozone executive committee) negotiated a deal for a bailout of the banking system in Cyprus. As part of the deal, a one-time, one-off levy on depositors was agreed: deposits below €100,000 are subject to a 6.75% levy, while those over €100,000 are subject to a 9.99% "fine". While none of the timing is surprising – late Friday, early Saturday is always the ideal time to push such measures down people's throats -, neither did it
Read More...Artwork: Ilargi for the Automatic Earth During the Italian election weekend two weeks ago, I watched all three Godfather films on a local station. Very convenient, since they can teach you quite a bit about Italy, even if you've seen them a dozen times already in the past. The abdication of the pope sort of rounded off the history lesson, and I was thinking: OK, now I'm good to go. After the results came in and Beppe Grillo and the
Read More...Ilargi: I received another entry from Dave Fairtex, who delves into Spanish housing data this time around. We had a nice discussion about it, since I question some of the assumptions on which he bases his interpretation of the data. In particular, I think Dave assumes 2 things: 1) That, during the – ongoing – bust, Spanish home prices will fall to the level they were at when the boom began (a drop of 55%), and then stop falling right
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