Doomed

[doodab]

Couldn’t happen to us, could it? After all, Britain is nothing like Cyprus. Cyprus is a small island, far from the “action”, with contented natives who prefer not to notice as more and more of their wealth is bought up by oligarchically rich foreigners. Our banks don’t cripple themselves with out-of-control lending to those natives, presumably on the back of all those foreign investments. Oh.

The real mistake over the Cyprus bail-out would be to think it can’t happen here in Britain - Telegraph

Time to stash foreign cash under the mattress?

[OwlHoot]

A blog article here seems to sum up the situation rather well

[SantaClaus]

Every time a politician states that the Cyprus bank tax will never happen anywhere else, I worry a little bit more.

[Mich the Tester]

A blog article here seems to sum up the situation rather well

Yep, I like this bit;

I reasoned that European leaders have taxed the current productive generation to the limit of its patience and crippled future generations with debt to the limit of their credibility with the markets.

Amazingly though, there are still middle class people here in NL who live under the delusion that what the government provides is somehow sufficient to justify how much it takes. They also live under the delusion that Europe's economy can just carry on with even the most parsimonious of governments spending 3% more than their revenues, and that somehow we'll be able to compete with China, India and the newly rising African economies.

I've done the sums; there is no point for me and Lady Tester to work more than 32 hours a week. There's no point saving as inflation and tax will eat up the money, we may as well just pay off most of the mortgage (not all of it, because then we can't get sickness benefits), then go for semi-retirement and accept we'll have to eat meatballs and drive second hands cars (which isn't a bad life at all). Basically, if you're ambitious, either get out of here or get a numbered account in Switzerland.

Europe is ****ed.

[DimPrawn]

Banks will be bailed out at any cost, raid savings, raid pensions, harvest babies for organs, you name it, they will do it.

Doomed indeed.

[doodab]

Mayday soon innit.

I suspect the protests might be a bit larger this year.

[tomtomagain]

Don't worry. It will never happen here.

The Bank of England is the governments "Lender of Last Resort" and will always just print money to fund government borrowing.

Much in the same way as the Zimbabwean government never defaulted on it's loans due to it's ability to print money.

Printing money is the safety mechanism that Cyprus didn't have.


PS : The end result is pretty similar for you and me though ....

[dundeedude]

The Newsnight extract from the comments section of that blog made for interesting viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqDnnzY_tU8