The Global Financial Pyramid Scheme By The Numbers

The dominoes are starting to tumble, and nobody is immune

By  Michael Snyder

Why is the global economy in so much trouble?  How can so many people be so absolutely certain that the world financial system is going to crash?  Well, the truth is that when you take a look at the cold, hard numbers it is not difficult to see why the global financial pyramid scheme is destined to fail.  In the United States today, there is approximately 56 trillion dollars of total debt in our financial system, but there is only about 9 trillion dollars in our bank accounts.  So you could take every single penny out of the banks, multiply it by six, and you still would not have enough money to pay off all of our debts.

Overall, there is about 190 trillion dollars of total debt on the planet.  But global GDP is only about 70 trillion dollars.  And the total notional value of all derivatives around the globe is somewhere between 600 trillion and 1500 trillion dollars.  So we have a gigantic problem on our hands.  The global financial system is a very shaky house of cards that has been constructed on a foundation of debt, leverage and incredibly risky derivatives.  We are living in the greatest financial bubble in world history, and it isn't going to take much to topple the entire thing.  And when it falls, it is going to be the largest financial disaster in the history of the planet.

The global financial system is more interconnected today than ever before, and a crisis at one major bank or in one area of the world can spread at lightning speed.  As I wrote about yesterday, the entire European banking system is leveraged 26 to 1 at this point.  A decline in asset values of just 4 percent would totally wipe out the equity of many of those banks, and once a financial panic begins we could potentially see major financial institutions start to go down like dominoes.

We got a small taste of what that is like back in 2008, and it is inevitable that it will happen again.

Anyone that would tell you that the current global financial system is sustainable does not know what they are talking about.  Just look at the numbers that I have posted below.

The following is the global financial pyramid scheme by the numbers...

-$9,283,000,000,000 - The total amount of all bank deposits in the United States.  The FDIC has just 25 billion dollars in the deposit insurance fund that is supposed to "guarantee" those deposits.  In other words, the ratio of total bank deposits to insurance fund money is more than 371 to 1.

-$10,012,800,000,000 - The total amount of mortgage debt in the United States.  As you can see, you could take every penny out of every bank account in America and it still would not cover it.

-$10,409,500,000,000 - The M2 money supply in the United States.  This is probably the most commonly used measure of the total amount of money in the U.S. economy.

-$15,094,000,000,000 - U.S. GDP.  It is a measure of all economic activity in the United States for a single year.

-$16,749,269,587,407.53 - The size of the U.S. national debt.  It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.

-$32,000,000,000,000 - The total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).

-$50,230,844,000,000 - The total amount of government debt in the world.

-$56,280,790,000,000 - The total amount of debt (government, corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system.

-$61,000,000,000,000 - The combined total assets of the 50 largest banks in the world.

-$70,000,000,000,000 - The approximate size of total world GDP.

-$190,000,000,000,000 - The approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.  It has nearly doubled in size over the past decade.

-$212,525,587,000,000 - According to the U.S. government, this is the notional value of the derivatives that are being held by the top 25 banks in the United States.  But those banks only have total assets of about 8.9 trillion dollars combined.  In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 24 to 1.

-$600,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 - The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives generally fall within this range.  At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives to global GDP is more than 21 to 1.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Just when you thought it was safe…

Bailing out Cyprus was always going to be tricky. But it didn’t have to be like this

By The Economist

EVEN by the standards of European policymaking, the past week has been a disaster. In the early hours of March 16th, nine months after Cyprus first requested a bail-out, euro-zone finance ministers, led by the Germans, offered a €10 billion ($13 billion) deal, well short of the €17 billion needed. Who ordered whom to do precisely what is not clear, but the Cypriots then said they would raise a further €5.8 billion by imposing a levy on depositors—of 9.9% on savings above the €100,000 insurance-guarantee limit, and 6.75% for deposits below it. Chaos ensued, not least among the many Russians (reputable or not) who have parked their money in the lightly regulated island. On March 19th, with crowds in the streets and all the banks firmly shut, the Cypriot parliament rejected the bail-out package (see article). As The Economist went to press, the scene had shifted to Moscow, where the Cypriots were trying to persuade Vladimir Putin and his cronies to contribute some money in exchange, perhaps, for future gas revenues.

Cyprus is a Mediterranean midget, with a GDP of only $23 billion. But this crisis could have poisonous long-term consequences. Eight months after the European Central Bank appeared to have restored stability by promising to do whatever it took to save the currency, the risk of a euro member being thrown out has returned. It has increased the chances of deposit runs (if Cyprus can grab your money, why not Italy or Spain?). And it has revealed the lack of progress towards a durable solution to the euro’s troubles. Ideally, all this will prompt the Europeans to push ahead with reforms, but with a German election in the autumn that seems unlikely.

Cyprus is broke. Its debt, if it took on its banks’ liabilities, would hit 145% of GDP. This newspaper suggested recapitalising Cypriot banks, on a case-by-case basis, directly through the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), thus breaking the vicious circle where weak sovereigns bail out weak banks. We also argued for depositors and senior bondholders to be spared—not out of any particular love for rich Russians, but because of the fear of bank runs in larger weak euro economies. The Europeans instead decided to lend the money directly to the Cypriot government; and the Cypriots, perhaps bullied by some creditors, then decided to clobber all the banks’ depositors, even the insured ones.

Why Europe Must Play Hardball with Cyprus

A Game of Chicken

by Christian Rickens

The Cypriot rejection on Tuesday night of the euro-zone bailout package for the country's ailing banks has triggered a power struggle between the island nation and the European Union. If Brussels gives in, future efforts to save the euro will be made more difficult. All hopes are now on Russia.

Efforts to save the euro have long been criticized for being undemocratic, with bailout packages being assembled behind closed doors in Brussels. But after Tuesday evening's vote in the Cypriot parliament, that critique will be difficult to maintain. Not a single parliamentarian in Nicosia cast a vote in favor of the bailout package, one which foresaw a mandatory levy on accounts held with Cypriot banks.

Thirty-six lawmakers voted against the deal and 19 abstained, including those belonging to President Nikos Anastasiades' center-right DISY party. With their veto of the expropriation plan, parliamentarians in the island nation showed that representatives of a small European Union member state can indeed block euro-zone efforts to save the common currency.

Anastasiades, of course, didn't exert much effort to find a majority for the deal, even though he had agreed to it in Brussels. On the contrary, even before the parliamentary debate began, he said the package was unlikely to pass -- a virtual invitation to lawmakers to reject it. The move could even be a tactical one. Anastasiades can now return to Brussels in the hopes of leveraging better conditions out of Cyprus' euro-zone partners by highlighting his country's rebellious parliament.

It could also be useful as a lever in Moscow. On Wednesday morning, all eyes were on Russia in the hopes that the country might jump in to provide Nicosia emergency aid. Russian investors have parked billions of euros in Cypriot bank accounts -- indeed the presence of Russian money is one reason why Cyprus' banking sector holds assets worth more than seven times the country's annual gross domestic product. According to media reports, Anastasiades spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately following the failed parliamentary vote and the Cypriot finance minister flew to Moscow on Tuesday night.

Bullied from Abroad

In the coming negotiations, the Euro Group must be careful as it seeks to maintain its credibility. The vote on Tuesday evening made one thing clear: The main concern in Nicosia was not in fact those who held smaller sums in Cypriot accounts. By Tuesday morning, the original deal had been changed to exempt from the bank levy those holding less than €20,000 in their savings accounts. That the parliamentary veto was nonetheless unanimous shows that lawmakers are primarily interested in maintaining Cyprus' role as a low-tax paradise and offshore business haven. It also shows that Cypriots are unwilling to be bullied from abroad, particularly not by the Germans.

Cyprus's High-Stakes ECB Gamble

A Mediterranean Jonestown

By SIMON NIXON

The euro zone is used to brinkmanship. But since the Cypriot parliament refused to sanction a tax on bank deposits, a vital condition of its proposed €10 billion ($13 billion) bailout, the currency bloc is in uncharted territory.

What happens next depends on the response of the European Central Bank. The Cypriot parliament is gambling that the ECB is bluffing when it says it will withdraw Emergency Liquidity Assistance from the country's banks, thereby precipitating their likely financial collapse.

True, the ECB has blinked before. It had originally threatened to withdraw permission for the Central Bank of Cyprus to provide ELA on Jan. 21. But it backed down because it believed that there was the prospect of a bailout deal that would recapitalize the country's broken banking system once the presidential election was out of the way in February. At that point, it said it would review its decision after two months, a deadline that expires this Thursday.

During Friday's marathon negotiations over the current bailout proposal, ECB executive board member Jörg Asmussen made clear to President Nicos Anastasiades that failure to agree on a deal that weekend would make it impossible for the ECB to provide a further extension of ELA. After all, ECB rules don't allow national central banks to lend to insolvent banks.

But any actual decision to withdraw ELA is a matter for the ECB's Governing Council, and that needs two-thirds of the council's members to vote in favor.

The Cypriot parliament may be calculating that it can count on enough Governing Council members to block any move to withdraw ELA. After all, the ECB's rules say it can only withdraw a national central bank's right to provide ELA to protect the monetary integrity of the euro zone.

If Governing Council members wanted reasons not to withdraw ELA, they could always argue that a possible Cypriot euro exit would do more damage to euro-zone monetary integrity than keeping its banks alive. Besides, even if ELA eventually replaced the entire €70 billion of Cypriot deposits, it would make little difference to overall euro-zone money supply.

But this is complacent. Even if Cyprus is small, the ECB must consider the precedent it would create if it allowed the Central Bank of Cyprus to continue providing ELA in the absence of a deal.

The more likely outcome is that the liquidity provision continues beyond Thursday, dependent on two conditions: First, that it receives credible assurances that there is a realistic prospect of an alternative deal. Second, that the banks remain shut until that deal is concluded to minimize the low-level bank run that is already under way as Cypriots continue to empty automatic cash machines.

Whether Cyprus can meet these conditions is an open question. Any deal will require Cyprus to find €6 billion from its citizens to help pay for the bank recapitalizations. That must be done to keep the cost of the euro-zone bailout below €10 billion and the government's debt sustainable—an essential condition for International Monetary Fund involvement, which is, in turn, an essential condition for the German government and parliament to agree to a deal.

So the banks will have to stay shut and the Cypriot parliament keep voting until it comes up with the "right" answer or decides to quit the euro. Sound familiar?

The ECB Just Gave Cyprus Its Drop Dead Date

Next Monday is the drop dead date by Cyprus

If Cyprus doesn't have a deal in place by then, the ECB will not provide its banks the emergency liquidity assistance they need to continue to operate.

Earlier this week, the Cypriot parliament rejected a plan that would have recapitalized the country's banks by imposing a one-off tax on all depositors.

Since then the government has been scrambling to come up with the nearly 6 billion euros that the country must supply to save its banks.

Below the dotted line is press release the ECB just put out, where in the central bank says that assistance will be cut off unless there's a deal.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

21 March 2013 - Governing Council decision on Emergency Liquidity Assistance requested by the Central Bank of Cyprus

The Governing Council of the European Central Bank decided to maintain the current level of Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) until Monday, 25 March 2013.

Thereafter, Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) could only be considered if an EU/IMF programme is in place that would ensure the solvency of the concerned banks.

ECB Re-Bluffs To Cyprus Bluff

"Prepared To Let Cyprus Go"

By Tyler Durden
When the market briefly surged yesterday, following the cryptic note from the ECB that it would "provide liquidity within existing rules" we urged to ignore the kneejerk algorithmic exuberance (although with only algos left trading that was obviously self-defeating) which interpreted this as an indication the ECB would provide unconditional liquidity now and forever, and that this was hardly a bullish sign because "the last thing the ECB wants is to appear weak, and fold letting every other broke deadbeat country to demand the same equitable treatment and diluting Germany's political might." Today, Reuters has picked up on this coming out with its own analysis that the

"The European Central Bank is prepared to cut off funding to Cyprus and let the Mediterranean island succumb to financial meltdown if it has to, confident it has unlimited firepower to protect the rest of the euro zone."

It is unclear how much of the article is actual analysis, and how much interest-driven propaganda to put the ball back in Cyprus court with the imputed knowledge that the ECB will not fold and thus cave to Troika deposit haircut demands, but fundamentally the logic is there as, once more, the ECB will hardly want to appear weak and cave in to a "recalcitrant" and unyielding Cyprus. Of course, what happens if indeed Cyprus decides to pull the € plug, should Russia provide an unlimited backstop and in the process subjugate a part of European territory without firing a shot, and the precedent that Europe can and will let members go, nobody knows but one thing is certain: stocks will go, as always, up.

From Reuters:

Cyprus propelled the 17-nation bloc into uncharted waters on Tuesday by rejecting a proposed levy on bank deposits as a condition of a 10 billion euro ($12.9 billion) EU bailout.

Without the aid, much of it to recapitalize Cypriot banks, the ECB says they will be insolvent, and it requires banks to be solvent for them to receive central bank support.

Denied these funds, Cyprus would be left staring into a financial abyss.

For the rest of the euro zone, the ECB has a suite of policy tools at its disposal to prevent contagion - with bond purchases and unlimited liquidity offers to the fore.

Not Out of The Woods Yet

Despite Progress, Euro Crisis Is Far From Over

by Christian Rickens

The Greek debt cut worked and the rescue package has gone through. So is the euro crisis over? By no means. The situation in Greece will take a turn for the worse again in a few weeks. The other euro nations will have to use the time until then to get their own houses in order -- especially Germany.

For a change, everything has been going according to plan in the fight to save the euro in recent weeks. On Wednesday, euro-zone finance ministers gave the green light to the €130 billion ($170 billion) second rescue package for Greece. It's a pure formality after a satisfyingly large proportion of creditors agreed to a debt cut for Greece. Perhaps the most significant success of recent days is that even though the debt cut was deemed a so-called credit event, triggering the payment of the financial contracts known as credit default swaps, hardly anyone seemed to care.

For more than two years, the international financial lobby had been warning the public and governments that these credit default swaps must under no circumstances be triggered, because that would cause a disaster similar to the meltdown that followed the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. Their message, effectively, was that taxpayers should cover all the losses, rather than private-sector creditors. But the CDS horror scenario has failed to become reality.

So has Greece been rescued and financial markets been tamed? Is the euro crisis a thing of the past? Unfortunately not. With their successes in the last few days, euro-zone politicians have done little more than bought themselves time. They must use this window to brace themselves for the next wave of the euro crisis which is about to crash down on Europe.

It's already clear that the Greek economy can't survive with a government debt to GDP ratio that will -- at best -- still be at 117 percent in 2020, especially given the record pace at which the country's GDP is contracting. There is still no coherent strategy for making Greece competitive again inside the euro zone, or for raising the capital for the huge investments needed -- let alone for the wholesale revamp of the country's entire public administration.

Greek Crisis Will Escalate Again

And so Greece is likely to report the next set of disappointing budget figures in a few months, and the wrangling over a new debt cut and a new rescue package will start shortly afterwards. Maybe the next wave of the crisis will hit us even sooner: Greece is scheduled to hold an election on April 22 which is expected to produce a left-wing majority deeply opposed to the strict austerity program imposed by Brussels.

Adopt a polar bear?

How did the polar bear, a vicious killing machine that is thriving, become the poster boy of climate-change alarmism?

by Rob Lyons 

Save the whale? That’s so 1970s. Now it’s the mighty polar bear that has become the poster child of the environmental movement. But are polar bears really facing extinction, or are they just a photogenic vehicle for promoting alarm about global warming?

‘Adopt a polar bear’, suggests the green NGO, WWF. WWF will even give you a cuddly toy polar bear for signing up. ‘Many scientists believe polar bears could be gone from most of their current range within 100 years’, says the WWF website, citing climate change as the major threat to the bears. Earlier this month, the US tried - and failed - to persuade the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), to ban cross-border trade in polar bears and their parts. The US lists the polar bear as a ‘threatened’ species, while the International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists it as a ‘vulnerable’ species.

The major claim is that climate change is causing the sea ice in the Arctic to melt earlier and refreeze later. As the press release for a new paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology, released today, suggests, this makes life harder for polar bears. The paper’s researchers tracked female polar bears in the western Hudson Bay area of Canada from 1991 to 1997, and again from 2004 to 2009. According to the lead researcher, Dr Seth Cherry: ‘The data suggest that in recent years, polar bears are arriving on shore earlier in the summer and leaving later in the autumn. These are precisely the kind of changes one would expect to see as a result of a warming climate and may help explain some other studies that are showing declines in body condition and cub production.’

But before we start getting into a lather about the future of nature’s greatest land-based killing machines (sorry, I mean big furry canaries in the climate-change coalmine), it is worth noting that there are more optimistic voices around. Susan Crockford, an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, has just produced a short paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) called Ten Good Reasons Not To Worry About Polar Bears.

Treating workers like unthinking primitives

The idea that workplaces should root out employees’ ‘unconscious biases’ is patronising and illiberal

by Para Mullan 

In the human resources (HR) field in which I work, there is currently a lot of discussion about people’s unconscious biases in the workplace. You know the type of thing: unconscious bias against women; unconscious bias in favour of men; unconscious bias against people with different ethnic backgrounds, and so on.

So when an email dropped into my inbox urging me to test my unconscious bias using the ‘implicit association test’, I was intrigued. For the next few minutes, I tested myself to see if I was ‘gender prejudiced’, typing certain letters to indicate positive or negative associations with particular statements.

Then came the results: ‘Your data suggest a moderate association of Male with CAREER and Female with FAMILY, compared to Female with CAREER and Male with FAMILY.’

What a huge non-surprise. Does it matter if my ‘unconscious bias’ makes me mildly disassociate females from careers? Surely what is more significant than my ‘unconscious bias’ is my conscious judgement. That is, I consider myself an objective, rational person, and when I recruit new staff, my decisions are based on criteria that apply to all candidates. If I were to let any ‘prejudice’ show, my fellow interviewers would put me right.

Unfortunately, many in the HR profession have bought into this concept of dealing with ‘unconscious bias’ and are offering training and education to fellow professionals. A report published by Business in the Community (BITC) at the end of 2012 claimed that recruitment of ethnic minorities has increased in organisations where employers have been educated about their ‘unconscious bias’.

Now, it does not take a rocket scientist to work out that if an organisation is focusing on recruiting ethnic minorities, then the number of ethnic-minority recruits will increase, just as the number of women in management positions will increase if you implement gender quotas. What these methods do not establish, however, are the benefits of ‘unconscious bias’ training.

It may be practically ineffective, but ‘unconscious bias’ training is successful in one regard: it suggests to HR departments that people’s unconscious thought processes are more important than their conscious ones. It encourages managers to view their employees less like humans and more like animals. But unlike animals, we think, we reason and we act. We make decisions and judgements. But unconscious bias theory pays no heed to any of that.

Cyprus: The ghost of the West yet to come

Cyprus offers a grim glimpse of a possible future for the wider western world

By John Phelan

When the European Union (with German money) mounted its most recent bailout of Greece, one of the conditions was a 75 percent write down of Greek government debt. For the Cypriot banks, which had made loans to the Greek government totalling 160 percent of Cyprus’s GDP, this was disastrous.

With their capital bases smashed the Cypriot government felt obliged to bail them out. Lacking the funds to do so (in 2011 the IMF reported that the assets of Cypriot banks totalled 835 percent of GDP) it turned to the European Union (in reality Germany again) for a bailout.

The Germans are reluctant to lend money without conditions. If the terms of the bailout are accepted by the Cypriot parliament, in return for the €10 billion corporation tax will rise from 10 percent to 12.5 percent and interest on bank deposits will be subject to a withholding tax.

But the most controversial aspect is the proposal that bank deposits will be subject to a one off “solidarity levy”, amounts under €100,000 at a rate of 6.75 percent and those over €100,000 at 9.9 percent. 

This is the eurozone crisis at its most extreme but it only differs from events in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, by degree. And in as far as  government eventually has to tailor its outgoings to suit its income it is really just an extreme version of the situation which will also eventually face Japan, Britain, and the US, probably in that order.

So what lessons does Cyprus hold for those who still have all this to come?

Cyprus and the reality of banking

Deposit haircuts are both inevitable and the right thing to do

By Detlev Schlichter

I, too, was shocked yesterday morning. Not so much by the news that depositors at Cypriot banks would face a haircut, or a ‘levy’ or a ‘tax’, on their deposits as a contribution to yet another Eurozone bailout package funded by taxpayers in other counties but by the reaction in the press. Here was, according to the majority of the international commentariat, yet another example of the ineptitude or outright meanspiritedness of the Eurozone policy elite, another example of imposing needless and counterproductive hardship and brutal ‘austerity’ on innocent citizens in small and troubled countries. The Daily Telegraph on its front page spoke in usual hyperbole of a ‘EU raid on savings’ and, naturally, of another ‘threat to the recovery’. What agitated most commentators was that the ‘sanctity’ of deposit insurance had been carelessly violated as even deposits of less than €100,000 were, at first at least, supposed to be subjected to a reduced haircut as well. Those types of deposits are supposed to enjoy a ‘guarantee’ that magically shields them from the harsh reality of bankrupt banks and bankrupt states. Undermining this ‘guarantee’ could have wide-reaching consequences beyond tiny Cyprus as it has the potential to undermine the trust in banking systems in Greece, Spain and Portugal.

I agree that this move is risky. The international banking system is highly levered and in large parts has been teetering on the brink of disaster for many years. Anything that affects depositors can have grave consequences. But given the state of affairs, any meaningful attempt to deal with the banking systems’ problems must inevitably entail risks. The questions are the following: Are the right type of risks being taken? And what would the alternative be?

Banking is a risky business because banks are highly leveraged enterprises. (Sorry to break that news to you.) In a fractional-reserve banking system ‘deposits’ are not deposits (i.e. contracts for safe-keeping) but loans to banks and thus loans to highly leveraged businesses.

Most people in developed countries have become used to not worrying about the health of individual banks. They have, over the course of decades, been conditioned to believe that all banks are regulated by the state and ultimately protected by the state. – Yes, but only so that the banks can take even more risks and become even more leveraged. State ‘protection’ has now created a banking monster that is swallowing up the resources of the state itself. And this can hardly come as a shock surprise in early 2013!

The naïve believe that bank deposits are always ‘money good’ because they are backed by the state and the state, after all, is an endless cornucopia, was maybe understandable, or at least excusable, until about 2008, when then Prime Minister of Ireland, Brian Cowen, in the middle of the Irish banking crisis, had the genius idea to simply declare a state guarantee for all deposits at Irish banks. Hey, problem solved! Obviously, Cowen didn’t do the math and didn’t realize how big that guarantee was going to be. Well, he was found out by the markets – and Ireland, the country, went bankrupt.

After Lehman, after Ireland and Iceland, and after Greece, I think you must have lived in a cave for the past 5 years to really think that banks are safe because they are guaranteed by their governments. Come on! Please get real.

Excuse me but my sympathies for Cypriot depositors is somewhat limited. If you are a depositor in a Cypriot bank, whether of deposits of more or less than €100,000, who did you think was guaranteeing your deposit? The Blue Fairy? Did you really think that in such a small place with such a bizarrely bloated banking system – one that for years and, by now, very publicly had been investing in Greek government bonds! – your government had the resources to protect all depositors? The bailout of Cyprus’ two largest banks will cost the equivalent of 60% of GDP! And after what happened in Greece, did you really think that the Germans were willing to cover the whole bill?

I am a free market guy. I am in favor of laissez faire so I always like to see placards that read “Hands off”. One could see such placards at demonstrations in Cyprus yesterday: “Hands off Cyprus”. That is great. But be careful what you wish for. A proper hands-off policy means letting the chips fall where they may. That would certainly mean no bailout and thus total collapse of the Cypriot banking system and the Cypriot economy. Don’t forget that Cyprus and its banks and its depositors are still being bailed out with other people’s money here.

That is also what some of my libertarian friends don’t seem to get when they speak, as some of them did yesterday, of another incident of the ‘the state stealing from its citizens’ or of confiscating their property. As much sympathy as I usually have with these views, in this instance they are simply mistaken. If this were expropriation it would mean that the act of abstaining from this expropriation – of the expropriator simply doing nothing – would mean that the ‘victim’ keeps his property. But if the EU did nothing in this situation – “hands off”, laissez faire – it would mean that most depositors, including those under €100,000, got wiped out completely. The choice is not between keeping everything and paying a ‘levy’, but between paying a ‘levy’ and losing almost everything.

Some commentators will object here and say that, for the sake of a more cheerful public sentiment and for the sake of the nascent recovery, the bailout should be more generous and protect more Cypriots to a larger degree. But that would mean either more expropriation (and now the word is indeed appropriate) of taxpayers in Nordic countries, or more money-printing by the ECB. And this is where many commentators are either short-sighted or indeed hypocritical.

Using the printing press to cover any excess committed by banks and governments, no matter how outrageous, must mean inflation and this certainly hurts all savers, including those with savings of less than €100,000. I found it particularly galling that many of the commentators who are now posing as defenders of the small saver are usually among the loudest proponents of exiting the euro, issuing new and weaker currencies and using debasement to gain short-lived competitiveness – all measures that defraud the domestic saver. All those who persistently argue against ‘austerity’ and for more stimulus, more debt, weaker currencies, higher inflation, do not care at all for savers. As Keynes famously suggested, they want to kill the rentier class, whether the rentiers are big or small. And now they claim to be the advocates of savers?

Of course, there are notable exceptions. In today’s Telegraph, Jeremy Warner does a good job explaining how costly the bailout of British banks has been – and still is – to British savers, not least via higher inflation, zero interest rates and endless quantitative easing.  I also thought that Simon Nixon’s piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday was informative and balanced. But they are the exception.

I am no friend of the EU and I feel uncomfortable finding myself in a position in which I have to defend their policies but I feel that those elements for which the EU gets most viciously attacked in the media – ‘austerity’, letting Greece default, at least partially, bailing in depositors – are most sensible to me as these policies are, in principle at least, based on an acknowledgement of the underlying problems and as they do not seek near-tem comfort in the deceptive and damaging policies of endless fiscal transfers and money-printing

 .

Cyprus and the Death of Deposit Insurance

Can Cyprus happen in US ?

By Robert Tracinski 

From the beginning, the European crisis has been a story of small countries on the Eurozone's "periphery" revealing fundamental problems at the heart of the system. Now a very small country on the outer edges of the periphery—the tiny Mediterranean island of Cyprus, with about a million inhabitants and 0.02% of Europe's GDP—is triggering the latest wave of the crisis.

This is not really about Cyprus, of course, but about the precedent that is being set there. In exchange for an infusion of capital into the nation's banks, Cyprus is being asked to impose a "special bank levy" that would take 6.75% out of all bank deposits up to 100,000 euros, and 9.9% above that.

This is described as a "wealth tax," except that it's not a tax. A tax is a regular rule that operates uniformly according to a pre-determine formula. A one-time, ad hoc seizure of money isn't a tax. It is confiscation. Or we can use a plainer word for it: theft.

The big news isn't this bank heist, but who is pulling it off. The plan was imposed, not by some wild-eyed revanchist Communists, but by the finance ministers of respectable European countries, who thought up the idea and imposed it on Cyprus. Like Willie Sutton, they know where the money is.

There are special circumstances that made them think they might get away with it. Cyprus is a small island with a large banking center that holds deposits many times larger than the local economy. A lot of this money comes from Russia, and Cyprus is reputedly a tax haven for Russian "oligarchs" (politically connected billionaires) and mobsters. In an American context, you might compare Cyprus to the Cayman Islands, which have been so vilified just having a bank account there is enough to end a politician's career. Just ask Mitt Romney.

But in showing us what they'll do to an unsympathetic target, Europe's leaders are showing us what they would like to do everywhere: dig themselves and the crony banks out of a tight spot through the mass confiscation of wealth. It's the ultimate bailout plan: they just take whatever they need.

And there is more to it than that. This is confiscation, but it a particular kind of confiscation with particular implications. It is the end of deposit insurance. Depositors, particularly small depositors, are supposed to have an ironclad guarantee that their money will always be there, no matter what—that they won't wake up one Monday morning to find that 6.75% of it is gone.

That's why the Cyprus heist is really important. It is a warning that the whole system of deposit insurance is coming unglued.

Teaching students to think racially

Race theory is dividing university students

by Dennis Hayes 

You may never have heard of ‘critical race theory’, but it dominates academic and institutional thinking about race in the UK today. The University of Birmingham, for instance, recently opened a new research centre for ‘Race and Education’, headed by a leading critical race theorist.

The question of what critical race theory actually means is contested even by its practitioners. Many accept that it is not really a ‘theory’ at all, but rather a ‘perspective’ or a set of beliefs about racism. Or, to be more blunt, it is a political position pretending to be a theory.

For all its supposed academic credentials, critical race theory boils down to one simple claim: ‘If you are white you are racist!’ This absurd ‘theory’ is now in the mainstream of higher education. It is not only promoted by lecturers and professors who work in the area; it is increasingly the perspective of university managers, staff developers and equality and diversity officers, too.

Critical race theorists will dismiss my claim as absurd, but that is because they avoid saying what they really think. The fact that their basic, shared assumption is never stated - that is, if you are white you are racist - allows their views to be promoted and adopted by institutions and those who fund their theorising.

Yet there is an obvious and nasty consequence of their ‘theory’ - namely, the view that anyone who criticises their approach is also probably racist. That’s because critical race theory embodies a metaphysical truth that cannot be questioned. If you do question it, you provide evidence for its veracity and you are likely to be censured or disciplined.

The critical race theory perspective is devious. First, racism is held to be endemic in society, and a catalogue of examples is used to prove this, while counter-examples are ignored. Second, racism is declared to be complex - so complex, in fact, that any clear views on the subject are dismissed as white or liberal prejudice. Third, refuge is taken in relativism, and the ‘theory’ is declared to be a perspective that is both academic and a political or social-justice project.

Porn: no longer a dirty little secret

A serious crisis of values – one that censorship won't solve

by Frank Furedi 

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pornography consisted of printed or visual material that was available only on the margins of society. Individuals who bought pornographic literature would feel embarrassed if they were seen by others. Salacious and obscene magazines were kept in brown envelopes; buying porn was a dirty little secret between shop assistant and consumer.

That was then. Today, pornography has gone mainstream. It has been so normalised that people talk openly about ‘my porn’. Porn talk is a part of modern-day conversation.

Some of today’s debates about pornography are just a clash of views over what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ or ‘appropriate’ porn. ‘We need better lesbian scenes, not ones that blatantly pander to men, with heterosexual actresses looking vaguely nauseated as they gingerly trail their fake nails across each others’ breast implants’, argues one commentator and avid connoisseur of porn.

Of course, the normalisation of a culture of pornography has not gone unchallenged. Some use the term ‘pornification’ to describe the proliferation of self-conscious and explicit exhibitions of sexual themes and activites. Earlier this year, Britain’s shadow health minister, Diane Abbott, warned that British culture is ‘increasingly pornified’ and is damaging young people. Last week, a proposal was put before the European parliament calling on the EU to ‘take concrete action on discrimination against women in advertising’ via a ‘ban on all forms of pornography in the media’. The parliamentarians’ response captured the spirit of our times. They insisted that the proposed ban on porn should be dropped but they voted to regulate the media portrayal of women. In other words, porn is okay but the media degradation of women is not. This curiously selective approach towards censorship reveals officialdom’s acceptance that pornography is now an integral part of the European way of life.

The cultural significance of pornography

Historically, debates about pornography have focused on its alleged harms and its moral corruption of society. There have also been arguments about the very meaning of pornography. The question of what makes a particular picture or literary passage pornographic has been a source of dispute between artists and their moralistic critics for years.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, pornography is ‘the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc, in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this’. This definition links pornography to obscenity, which the OED defines as ‘the character or quality of being offensively indecent, lewdness’. Of course, definitions offer only limited help for clarifying the problem of porn, because the idea of what constitutes lewdness is to some extent always open to interpretation. Throughout history, important literary and artistic achievements have been condemned by moralists as pornographic.

Cyprus Rejects Deposit Levy in Blow to European Bailout Plan

Searching for Plan B

By Patrick Donahue and Georgios Georgiou 

Cyprus’s parliament rejected an unprecedented levy on bank deposits, dealing a blow to European plans to force depositors to shoulder part of the country’s rescue in a standoff that risks renewed tumult in the euro area.

Cypriot legislators in the capital Nicosia voted 36 against to none in favor of the proposal in a show of hands today. There were 19 abstentions. Hammered out by euro-area finance chiefs over the weekend, the deal had sought to raise 5.8 billion euros ($7.5 billion) by drawing funds from Cyprus bank accounts in return for 10 billion euros in international aid.

Stocks dropped and the euro fell to a three-month low against the dollar at the prospect of impasse in Cyprus. European officials including Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem had said that Cyprus must contribute to its own bailout, while stressing that the Cypriot situation is unique. German coalition lawmakers said that Cyprus can expect no aid without meeting the terms.

“Cyprus has rebuffed the outstretched hand” of its partners, Hans Michelbach, a German lawmaker from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc and the ranking member on parliament’s finance committee, said in an e-mailed statement. The vote is “an act of collective unreason” and “the people of Cyprus must now pay a high price.”

Nicosia Talks

Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who said the plan’s alternative would be the “indescribable misery” of a collapse in his country’s banking sector, is due to meet with political party leaders in Nicosia at 9 a.m. tomorrow, his office said before the vote. Cyprus’s banks and stock exchange will remain closed at least through tomorrow.

Anastasiades spoke by phone with Merkel today for the second time in as many days, German government chief spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a text message, declining to give details of the conversation.