“The EU continues its chainsaw juggling act. The austerity pledge from France is holding about as well as its Maginot Line, while Greece has sworn to meet its fiscal targets in 2014 2015 2016soon, and the Italians promise they’re going to kick some serious fiscal butt as soon as the country returns from holiday.
Spain reassures that it will squarely confront its need to raise worker productivity whenever the unions call an end to protests against austerity. And the Portuguese high court ruled it is unconstitutional for civil servants to work for less than twice the wages of their private-sector counterparts.
This chronic “the sky is falling” in the EU had induced investor news-cycle fatigue and rendered last year’s black-swan threat level from red to this year’s collective yawn…
… until Cyprus tossed another chainsaw into the act. The Cyprus looting of private wealth was a cold-shower reminder of the tenuous security of assets that are concentrated within reach of a single government – doubly true of nations in a desperate fiscal situation whose financial sector is about to topple.
The blatant theft of depositor money in Cypriot banks was at first peddled as a one-off emergency measure. Then a Freudian slip by the head of the Eurogroup finance ministers, Mr. Dijsselbloem, suggested this would be the new pattern for similar future events. Much back-pedaling and “clarification” ensued.
But don’t bother squinting as you try to read the lips of mumbling bureaucrats. Just follow what they’re doing and you won’t get blindsided.
What have they been up to? In October 2011, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) – a tentacle of the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank for central bankers – released a report that proposed a new regime to resolve financial-institution instability.
In the report, the FSB calls for solvency support for banks without taxpayer exposure and the allocation of losses to shareholders and unsecured and uninsured creditors. Deposits at a bank are considered a loan, and if a bank fails, its depositors become unsecured creditors for amounts that exceed the insurable limit.
It gets worse. To protect the integrity of the financial system, controls on both endogenous (the bank itself) and exogenous (other firms and cross-border cooperation) capital movement can be implemented. This is exactly what happened in Cyprus. To prevent capital flight out of the banking system, the movement of money out of or between banks was restricted, as well as capital sent outside the country.
The G20 has fully endorsed the plan, and its implementation is complete or under way in member jurisdictions. The US is a G20 member, so don’t kid yourself into believing it can’t happen in America. It can and will. The Cyprus event has been carefully framed as an anomaly when in fact it is part of a well-orchestrated script.
In the Year of Our Overlord 1 AF
January 1, 2014, will mark the start of Year 1 AF – “after FATCA.” In the run-up to the US reporting regime’s full implementation, many foreign banks have opted not to accept US persons as clients, and we can see why. FATCA is a huge burden on foreign financial institutions in terms of time and resources needed to identify, track, and report on their US clients….”
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