Robbing banks, reducing wages, increasing hours worked: the lessons to take from the Cyprus bailin.
The night Cyprus joined the euro….what goes up, must come down
What is the American State Department up to? What will Turkey do? Why didn’t things develop in Moscow? Where is Mario Draghi? WTF is this really all about?
The Slog: How do you tell if a eurocrat is short-sighted? You ask him to spot
the difference between a Russian billionaire’s pocket money and a
Cypriot’s life savings.
That gag doing the rounds in southern Europe sums up the perfectly
natural focus of most people in ClubMed: this is just more of the same
old same old Brussels-am-Berlin bullying cock-up, followed by mealy
mouthed denials and a screwed up financial system. As indeed it is. Put
with less humour but equal bluntness is this verdict from the OECD
Director General’s adviser Adrian Blundell-Wignall:
‘The Cyprus crisis is the result of policy mistakes and a failure of
collective responsibility, as well as an illustration of what bad policy
can do and could do if it’s not corrected.’ Quite. But not everyone is
as stupid as they pretend to be.
Type ‘Cyprus’ and ‘Putin’ into The Slog’s search engine, and you can
see that this small island is, and always has been, of pivotal strategic
importance in relations between Europeans and Arabs. The energy and
rare-earth mineral finds of recent years have merely accentuated what
was already a place of obvious military importance: access to the Med
for Moscow, and a jumping-off point for the US and its obsessive concern
with securing energy supplies and the ever-more tenuous Al Qaida.
What
very few people do for starters is just look where the hell Cyprus is.