2013

A lot has been made about the fact that Russian money was in Cyprus and that Cyprus was an offshore tax haven. A lot of people are claiming all of this money is mafia-related or in Cyprus to dodge taxes. And it is this claim, especially in…

the gist here is that 4.5bn euros in funds were alleged to have been shifted out of Cyprus just prior to the announcement of the country's bank holiday. The article alleges that government officials were prominent amongst those sending…

Regarding Cyprus, recently I heard someone claim that depositors are not creditors of a bank despite the fact that deposits are bank liabilities. This is bollocks. Depositors are indeed creditors, particularly in Europe where they are…

As I indicated three months ago, the IMF now supports capital controls in specific and extraordinary circumstances, particularly in view of its experience in Iceland. This is now relevant given the situation in Cyprus. Matina Stevins of Dow…

Today Cyprus voted to reject the deposit tax with 36 MPs voting against and 19 abstaining. One MP was absent. No one voted for the deposit tax. And so this trial balloon of bailing in insured depositors has crashed and burned spectacularly.…

Finally, a prominent “mainstreamer” Keynesian gets MMT. Over the past couple of years, Paul Krugman has got close, but he keeps claiming that MMT believes “deficits don’t matter”. He refuses to cite any MMTer who has ever said such a silly…

Despite calls from the junior coalition partner the Lib Dems, some businesses and the IMF, we expect Osborne and the Tory-led UK government to maintain the fiscal strategy of austerity. The austerity is counter-intuitively (for some),…

Sorry for the number of links today. It is a bit overkill. But there is just a huge amount of information pouring out about Cyprus which is very relevant to anyone interested in the EU, which should be anyone that cares about investing or…

The Cypriot banking system is insolvent. Heaping private losses onto taxpayers is bad public policy. Let's start with those two statements, because starting there makes clear that forcing losses onto bank creditors was the only choice in…

It has been non-stop Cyprus for the past couple of days this weekend. And it has brought back the bad ol' days when every weekend seemed to be another episode in endless crisis. To wit, this episode in Cyprus demonstrates how misplaced the…