Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A bit about Cyprus....

After the deal was reached between the European Monetary Fund and Cyprus about how to bail out the banks, the banks reopened.  (see this story for details

Banks in Cyprus reopened to customers for the first time in nearly two weeks Thursday, albeit with strict restrictions on transactions, after being closed to prevent people withdrawing all their savings during the country's acute financial crisis....The deal was finally reached in Brussels early Monday, and imposes severe losses on deposits of over 100,000 euros in the country's two largest banks, Laiki and Bank of Cyprus. Laiki will be broken up, with its good assets being absorbed by Bank of Cyprus. The exact amounts of the losses have not yet been officially announced.  Although the banks have opened, customers are severely limited in what transactions they can carry out. Capital controls, imposed to prevent worried savers and businesses rushing to withdraw all their money, include limiting cash withdrawals to 300 euros ($383) per day per person and limiting payments abroad to 5,000 euros.

Another story reported that

U.S. bank depositors probably won’t suffer the same fate as Cyprus bank depositors, who are looking at potential losses of as much as 60 percent of their accounts -- far more than initially estimated under the European rescue package to save the country from bankruptcy.  “All things considered, it is extremely unlikely that depositors at U.S. banks would ever suffer losses in the event of a bank failure,” said Paul Ashworth, chief North American economist at Capital Economics. “For a start, U.S. banks are better capitalized and the banking sector is a much smaller part of the overall economy.”Accounts at the Bank of Cyprus with deposits of more than €100,000 ($128,225), which are uninsured, will lose 37.5 percent of their value after they are converted into a class of bank shares, the Central Bank of Cyprus said in a statement Saturday.   (see link here)

So...it probably won't happen in the US.  But it very well may break the Eurozone and start the movement away from a common currency.



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