Coming To Your Bank Account Soon - THEY Take 10% by 'Law'......

[Magda Hassan]

People are starting to THINK [what a concept!] here in Europe, that if it can happen in Cyprus, it can happen in their country too....and many are thinking of taking ALL of their money out of ALL banks ASAP! The banks have shot themselves in the head - not the foot! Bankrun for Europe is about to begin...and could spread further around the World. Maybe this is the moment we have been waiting for....of course, the common man/woman will be ****ed - loosing much or all...but the 'situation' will become clear....who is the enemy and always were!mallprint:

That's what I was thinking when I saw them try and pull this one off. Ready, set, GO!

[Jan Klimkowski]

This is a geopolitical game of chess between Germany, Russia, multinational criminal networks, money laundering banks, NATO, the KGB, and oil and gas companies.

None of these parties gives a flying fuck about ordinary Cypriot people.

Indeed, the EU and the Germans were so oblivious to the impact of their bank raid on ordinary Cypriots that they didn't even consider the Cypriot people might say: "FUCK OFF AND DIE - YOU THIEVES!"

Just as Kosovo is America's proxy state in Europe, the gateway for drugs, arms and human trafficking, and money laundering, so Cyprus may soon become Russia's proxy state in Europe - with Russian companies exploiting and owning its huge gas reseverves.

And so the Grand Guignol continues.....

[Peter Lemkin]

In case you didn't hear, Cyprus banks will be closed all this week......or perhaps forever.....the contageon likely will spread to other lands shortly.....There are all kinds of strange things going on behind the obvious banksterism...but nothing good will come of this....nothing good at all!...Now, a precedent has been set...that a country can be told to take its citizen's private money to pay public debt....it used to be only the public money was used for that.....[and clever schemes to swindle private money, of course is as old as money itself.] The EU has a proper disaster on its hands....methinks worse than |Spain or Greece et al.

[Adele Edisen]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/busine...nted=print

The New York Times
March 20, 2013

Cyprus Keeps Banks Closed and Scrambles to Find Funds
By LIZ ALDERMAN and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN


NICOSIA, Cyprus Scrambling to placate international lenders, Cyprus late Wednesday proposed to nationalize pension funds from state-run companies and conduct an emergency bond sale to help raise the €5.8 billion the indebted country needs to secure a bailout.

The proposals are meant to sharply reduce the amount of money that would be raised by a controversial tax on bank deposits, as originally planned in an international bailout package totaling €10 billion, or about $13 billion, that the Cypriot Parliament rejected the night before.

But even the revised plan contains a bank tax that, while much smaller than originally proposed, might still not be palatable to Parliament. Under the new plan, all Cypriot bank deposits of up to €100,000 would be hit by a one-time tax of 2 percent. Deposits above that threshold would be subject to a 5 percent levy.

The fallback was being cobbled together as Cyprus's finance minister pressed his case in Moscow on Wednesday in hopes of securing additional aid from Russia, many of whose wealthiest citizens have big deposits in Cypriot banks.

At the same time, the Cypriot government decided to keep banks closed through the end of the week in an effort to prevent a run on Cyprus's financial institutions. Banks, which would reopen Tuesday after a national holiday on Monday, have frozen all accounts in a financial crisis here that risks tipping the country into default and sowing turmoil across the euro zone.

Banks have been closed since Saturday, and the authorities have ordered banks to keep automated bank machines filled with cash as long as their doors remain shut. But that has been of little help to the thousands of international companies who do banking in Cyprus, which cannot transfer money in and out of those accounts to conduct business.

The extended bank holiday is designed to buy time for the Cypriot authorities to reach an agreement with the so-called troika of rescuers the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission whose representatives were in Nicosia on Wednesday but were not certain to sign off on Cyprus's latest plan.

Three banks dominate the economy, and each is edging close to collapse. The government was also making tentative plans to merge at least two of them Cyprus Popular Bank and Bank of Cyprus and place the healthy assets into a one entity, while moving troubled assets into a so-called bad bank.

With all sides fearing that a crisis is imminent, even the Church of Cyprus, one of this Mediterranean island's biggest investors, was offering to throw its considerable wealth behind the rescue effort.

European officials, and especially the European Central Bank, are watching the situation with alarm, said a person close to the discussions who was not authorized to speak publicly. Right now, Cypriot banks, crippled by their heavy exposure to Greece's collapsed economy, are heavily dependent on low-interest financing from the E.C.B., which could be cut off if the banks do not remain solvent.

If Cyprus does not soon receive a financial lifeline, European officials fear that "the damage would be enormous, and the country itself would be at risk of collapse," the person close to the discussions said. Officials are concerned about the risk that Cyprus might need to leave the euro currency union, creating "a painful situation that would spur chaos," this person said.

On Wednesday morning, the finance minister of Cyprus, Michalis Sarris, met with his Russian counterpart, Anton G. Siluanov, at the Russian Finance Ministry. In the afternoon Mr. Sarris met for about 90 minutes with a deputy prime minister, Igor I. Shuvalov, at the main government offices in the Russian White House.

Cypriot banks racked up huge losses in the past several years by issuing loans to businesses in Greece that are now virtually worthless as that country grapples with the fourth year of a severe recession. The banks also took huge financial losses on large holdings of Greek government debt, which they bought when times were good in order to profit from attractive interest rates. The bailout crisis has outraged average Cypriots, many of whom oppose the government's skimming their accounts to pay for the banks' mistakes.

Russia has a significant stake in the outcome because its citizens, including many of the country's wealthiest people, have a total of about $30 billion on deposit in the failing Cypriot banking system. Russia has already given Cyprus a €2.5 billion loan, and talks have been under way for months about additional aid.

Emerging from Wednesday morning's session, Mr. Sarris reported no progress. "We underscored how difficult the situation is," he said, "and we will now continue our discussions to find a solution by which we hope we will be getting some support from Russia."

Russian officials would not comment on the afternoon session but said the meetings were done for the day. A news conference planned at the Cypriot Embassy was canceled on Wednesday afternoon.

Russian leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin, had reacted furiously to the inclusion of a bank deposit tax in the original bailout proposal, which they said caught them by surprise. Because it is not a member of the euro currency union, Russia was not a party to the bailout deal reached early last Saturday in Brussels by euro zone finance ministers.

Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia warned Wednesday that the European proposal of a tax on bank deposits could itself precipitate "a new series of local financial crises."

Mr. Medvedev, speaking to Russian and European journalists at his Gorky residence outside of Moscow, seemed to struggle for words in describing his reaction to the proposed tax on deposits. "I cannot compare it to anything but some decisions made at a certain period of time by the Soviet authorities that did not care much about people's savings," he said, according to Russian news agencies.

Mr. Medvedev said the ultimate resolution of the situation in Cyprus could affect relations between Russia and the European Union, which have been in competition to some degree over who will hold more sway over Cyprus's financial future.

Russia is said to be proposing its own Cypriot bailout deal, on the condition that Nicosia agrees to grant Russia's energy industry rights to Cyprus's potentially rich offshore reserves of natural gas. Although Moscow has not acknowledged such a proposal, in a further sign that gas rights might be part of the discussions, the Cypriot energy minister, Georgios Lakkotrypis, was also in Moscow on Wednesday.

In his comments outside the Russian Finance Ministry, Mr. Sarris denied that there had been a specific proposal of help from Gazprom, the giant Russian natural gas producer. "There were no offers nothing concrete," he said.

In Nicosia, the troika of lenders is still insisting that Cyprus somehow come up with €5.8 billion of the €10 billion bailout negotiated last weekend. The bank deposits tax, which Parliament voted down overwhelmingly Tuesday along with the bailout plan, was supposed to be the source of the country's contribution to the bailout package.

The original deal called for a tax of 6.75 percent on deposits of less than €100,000 and 9.9 percent on deposits above that threshold. Even after the Cypriot president, Nicos Anastasiades, revised the terms to exempt depositors with less than €20,000 in their accounts, Parliament rejected the plan.

The proposal that Mr. Anastasiades's cabinet announced early Wednesday evening calls for coming up with a portion of the €5.8 billion in part by taking over the pension funds of state-run companies, while also issuing additional government bonds. It was unclear late Wednesday how politically viable the pension seizure might be, or how the idea of taking on more debt might fly with the troika representatives.

In a separate and surprising twist on Wednesday, the head of the Church of Cyprus, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, went on television to propose putting all of its properties up as collateral so that the state could issue a new round of government bonds to raise money. The church is one of the largest and most influential investors in Cyprus, with extensive holdings in banks, real estate and other interests.

The archbishop suggested that all of the Church's dioceses, parishes and monasteries which are also big investors could then buy a portion of the bonds to help the country at a time of need.

Describing the church's holdings as "huge," without specifying a number, the archbishop said it would "put all its property is in the country's disposal in order to support the people, avoid the banking collapse and help the country stand on its own feet."

He said Parliament had made the right decision in rejecting the original bailout terms "and sent a clear message to Europeans that they should learn to respect smaller countries."

The church is the biggest stakeholder in Hellenic Bank, Cyprus's third-biggest bank, and one of the biggest shareholders in the largest, the Bank of Cyprus. It owns hotels, extensive swaths of land and a lucrative beverage company, Keo, that produces wines, beers and bottled water and is the biggest importer of Heineken beer.

It was unclear whether the troika would find such a proposal to be part of a viable solution for Cyprus. The moves, however, are a clear sign that Cypriot institutions are trying to figure out ways to reduce the country's dependence on international lenders and avoid the harsh terms that would be attached to a bailout from them.

David M. Herszenhorn reported from Moscow. Andreas Riris contributed reporting from Nicosia.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the days the banks would be closed. They were scheduled to reopen on Tuesday.

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

Does keeping the bank doors closed make any difference to electronic transfers out to other safe havens?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Does keeping the bank doors closed make any difference to electronic transfers out to other safe havens?

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

[Magda Hassan]

Does keeping the bank doors closed make any difference to electronic transfers out to other safe havens?

"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Maybe the Yellow Brick Road goes to Moscow....

[Magda Hassan]

A Safe and a Shotgun or Publicly-owned Banks? The Battle of Cyprus

by Ellen Brown

If these worries become really serious, . . . [s]mall savers will take their money out of banks and resort to household safes and a shotgun. Martin Hutchinson on the attempted EU raid on deposits in Cyprus banks

The deposit confiscation scheme has long been in the making. US depositors could be next . . . .(Photo: Filip Singer/European Pressphoto Agency)
On Tuesday, March 19, the national legislature of Cyprus overwhelmingly rejected a proposed levy on bank deposits as a condition for a European bailout. Reuters called it "a stunning setback for the 17-nation currency bloc," but it was a stunning victory for democracy. As Reuters quoted one 65-year-old pensioner, "The voice of the people was heard."
The EU had warned that it would withhold €10 billion in bailout loans, and the European Central Bank (ECB) had threatened to end emergency lending assistance for distressed Cypriot banks, unless depositors including small savers shared the cost of the rescue. In the deal rejected by the legislature, a one-time levy on depositors would be required in return for a bailout of the banking system. Deposits below €100,000 would be subject to a 6.75% levy or "haircut", while those over €100,000 would have been subject to a 9.99% "fine."
The move was bold, but the battle isn't over yet. The EU has now given Cyprus until Monday to raise the billions of euros it needs to clinch an international bailout or face the threatened collapse of its financial system and likely exit from the euro currency zone.

The Long-planned Confiscation Scheme

The deal pushed by the "troika" the EU, ECB and IMF has been characterized as a one-off event devised as an emergency measure in this one extreme case. But the confiscation plan has long been in the making, and it isn't limited to Cyprus.
In a September 2011 article in the Bulletin of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand titled "A Primer on Open Bank Resolution," Kevin Hoskin and Ian Woolford discussed a very similar haircut plan that had been in the works, they said, since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The article referenced recommendations made in 2010 and 2011 by the Basel Committee of the Bank for International Settlements, the "central bankers' central bank" in Switzerland.
The purpose of the plan, called the Open Bank Resolution (OBR) , is to deal with bank failures when they have become so expensive that governments are no longer willing to bail out the lenders. The authors wrote that the primary objectives of OBR are to:

• ensure that, as far as possible, any losses are ultimately borne by the bank's shareholders and creditors . . . .
  

The spectrum of "creditors" is defined to include depositors:

At one end of the spectrum, there are large international financial institutions that invest in debt issued by the bank (commonly referred to as wholesale funding). At the other end of the spectrum, are customers with cheque and savings accounts and term deposits.

Most people would be surprised to learn that they are legally considered "creditors" of their banks rather than customers who have trusted the bank with their money for safekeeping, but that seems to be the case. According to Wikipedia:

In most legal systems, . . . the funds deposited are no longer the property of the customer. The funds become the property of the bank, and the customer in turn receives an asset called a deposit account (a checking or savings account). That deposit account is a liability of the bank on the bank's books and on its balance sheet. Because the bank is authorized by law to make loans up to a multiple of its reserves, the bank's reserves on hand to satisfy payment of deposit liabilities amounts to only a fraction of the total which the bank is obligated to pay in satisfaction of its demand deposits.

The bank gets the money. The depositor becomes only a creditor with an IOU. The bank is not required to keep the deposits available for withdrawal but can lend them out, keeping only a "fraction" on reserve, following accepted fractional reserve banking principles. When too many creditors come for their money at once, the result can be a run on the banks and bank failure.
The New Zealand OBR said the creditors had all enjoyed a return on their investments and had freely accepted the risk, but most people would be surprised to learn that too. What return do you get from a bank on a deposit account these days? And isn't your deposit protected against risk by FDIC deposit insurance?
Not anymore, apparently. As Martin Hutchinson observed in Money Morning, "if governments can just seize deposits by means of a tax' then deposit insurance is worth absolutely zippo."

The Real Profiteers Get Off Scot-Free

Felix Salmon wrote in Reuters of the Cyprus confiscation:

Meanwhile, people who deserve to lose money here, won't. If you lent money to Cyprus's banks by buying their debt rather than by depositing money, you will suffer no losses at all. And if you lent money to the insolvent Cypriot government, then you too will be paid off at 100 cents on the euro. . . .
The big winner here is the ECB, which has extended a lot of credit to dubiously-solvent Cypriot banks and which is taking no losses at all.

It is the ECB that can most afford to take the hit, because it has the power to print euros. It could simply create the money to bail out the Cyprus banks and take no loss at all. But imposing austerity on the people is apparently part of the plan. Salmon writes:

From a drily technocratic perspective, this move can be seen as simply being part of a standard Euro-austerity program: the EU wants tax hikes and spending cuts, and this is a kind of tax . . . .
The big losers are working-class Cypriots, whose elected government has proved powerless . . . . The Eurozone has always had a democratic deficit: monetary union was imposed by the elite on unthankful and unwilling citizens. Now the citizens are revolting: just look at Beppe Grillo.

But that was before the Cyprus government stood up for the depositors and refused to go along with the plan, in what will be a stunning victory for democracy if they can hold their ground.

It CAN Happen Here

Cyprus is a small island, of little apparent significance. But one day, the bold move of its legislators may be compared to the Battle of Marathon, the pivotal moment in European history when their Greek forebears fended off the Persians, allowing classical Greek civilization to flourish. The current battle on this tiny island has taken on global significance. If the technocrat bankers can push through their confiscation scheme there, precedent will be established for doing it elsewhere when bank bailouts become prohibitive for governments.
That situation could be looming even now in the United States. As Gretchen Morgenson warned in a recent article on the 307-page Senate report detailing last year's $6.2 billion trading fiasco at JPMorganChase: "Be afraid." The report resoundingly disproves the premise that the Dodd-Frank legislation has made our system safe from the reckless banking activities that brought the economy to its knees in 2008. Writes Morgenson:

JPMorgan . . . Is the largest derivatives dealer in the world. Trillions of dollars in such instruments sit on its and other big banks' balance sheets. The ease with which the bank hid losses and fiddled with valuations should be a major concern to investors.

Pam Martens observed in a March 18th article that JPMorgan was gambling in the stock market with depositor funds. She writes, "trading stocks with customers' savings deposits that truly has the ring of the excesses of 1929 . . . ."
The large institutional banks not only could fail; they are likely to fail. When the derivative scheme collapses and the US government refuses a bailout, JPMorgan could be giving its depositors' accounts sizeable "haircuts" along guidelines established by the BIS and Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Time for Some Public Sector Banks?

The bold moves of the Cypriots and such firebrand political activists as Italy's Grillo are not the only bulwarks against bankster confiscation. While the credit crisis is strangling the Western banking system, the BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India and China have sailed through largely unscathed. According to a May 2010 article in The Economist, what has allowed them to escape are their strong and stable publicly-owned banks.
Professor Kurt von Mettenheim of the Sao Paulo Business School of Brazil writes, "The credit policies of BRIC government banks help explain why these countries experienced shorter and milder economic downturns during 2007-2008." Government banks countered the effects of the financial crisis by providing counter-cyclical credit and greater client confidence.
Russia is an Eastern European country that weathered the credit crisis although being very close to the Eurozone. According to a March 2010 article in Forbes:

As in other countries, the [2008] crisis prompted the state to take on a greater role in the banking system. State-owned systemic banks . . . have been used to carry out anticrisis measures, such as driving growth in lending (however limited) and supporting private institutions.

In the 1998 Asian crisis, many Russians who had put all their savings in private banks lost everything; and the credit crisis of 2008 has reinforced their distrust of private banks. Russian businesses as well as individuals have turned to their government-owned banks as the more trustworthy alternative. As a result, state-owned banks are expected to continue dominating the Russian banking industry for the foreseeable future.
The entire Eurozone conundrum is unnecessary. It is the result of too little money in a system in which the money supply is fixed, and the Eurozone governments and their central banks cannot issue their own currencies. There are insufficient euros to pay principal plus interest in a pyramid scheme in which only the principal is injected by the banks that create money as "bank credit" on their books. A central bank with the power to issue money could remedy that systemic flaw, by injecting the liquidity needed to jumpstart the economy and turn back the tide of austerity choking the people.
The push to confiscate the savings of hard-working Cypriot citizens is a shot across the bow for every working person in the world, a wake-up call to the perils of a system in which tiny cadres of elites call the shots and the rest of us pay the price. When we finally pull back the veils of power to expose the men pulling the levers in an age-old game they devised, we will see that prosperity is indeed possible for all.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/22-6

[Lauren Johnson]

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, reported that it was his job to make sure huge international development loans went through. The loans that he approved were not solvent and he knew it. The purpose of the loans was ultimately to weaken the sovereignty of a given state, allow for asset stripping, and to make way for the selection of more compliant governments. The Cold War was always a part of the larger scheme to make the world safer for a few very large private banks.

What is the Endgame?

[Peter Lemkin]

I think the words of Perkins are very pertinent here. He can be found on youtube and some of his books in ebook form are on the internet. Not yet mentioned in this mix [much, as Jan pointed out not what is seen above 'waterline', but happening deep below] is that there were verified reports of very large depositors [only] removing their money from Cyprus days before this 'surprise' announcement - i.e. some insiders got out when the going was good....it is not known publicly who they were or the amounts involved. Officially it is denied, but even some banks verified this without giving details.....they put it up to chance :wirlitzer: