masterwordsmith-unplugged

According to BBC News:

MPs in Cyprus are due to begin voting on a series of bills that aim to raise the funds the country needs to secure an international bailout. 

The country is in a race against time after the European Central Bank gave Cyprus until Monday to find the money. 

If it does not, liquidity to the country's banks could be cut off and they could collapse.
Talks on new Russian financial aid for Cyprus have failed, Russia's finance minister has confirmed. 

Anton Siluanov, speaking after talks with his Cypriot counterpart Michael Sarris, said Russian investors were not interested in Cyprus' offshore gas reserves. CLICK HERE for more.

To further understand the implications of the move, do read Ben Davies' article in The Cobden Centre on Cyprus - Oh The Irony!?

Excerpt:

Seemingly innocuous events can portend more serious outcomes, though we recognise them only in hindsight. This is the dramatic irony of history. When a single shot in Sarajevo took out a largely unknown European aristocrat, who would have known then that the world would plunge into the First World War. 

The Cypriot savers must have thought the authorities were being highly ironic, of the Socratic kind, when they were told they were receiving a bail-out, except it was a “bail-in”. I don’t know the Greek/Turkish for ‘you are having a laugh’, but I bet that’s what they are saying. So what is a bail-in? 

A bail-in takes place before a bankruptcy, and involves losses being imposed on bondholders, something that has rarely taken place throughout the GFC and euro crisis. In fact taxpayers (the government) have consistently bailed-out the private sector in full. The Cypriot bank rescue is no exception, except this time there is a bail-in and ironically again not of bondholders but of the depositors first. This is a direct contravention to the usual legal claims on the capital structure. 

So there you have it – on Friday 14th March Cyprus became the 5th country to receive an EU bail-out (in), except this one was a bail-in but one with a significant and severe twist of fate. The Cypriot government in Nicosia is scheduled to vote on a EU bail-out plan which calls to extract a “tax” on bank depositors (savers) some €5.8 billion: 6.75 per cent for anyone with less than €100,000 in a Cypriot bank account, 9.9 per cent for anyone with more than that. 

This is an unprecedented assault on individual property rights and every individual in the developed world should take notice, and far from stabilising the eurozone, the bail-out likely heightens contagion risk across the EU.
Why bother holding a bank account when your government can expropriate your savings? Far from containing a bank run in Cyprus, it will exacerbate it, absent capital controls, and likely begin significant depositor flights across the European periphery. CLICK HERE for the rest of the entry.