From The Real Economy:
The tragedy of Cyprus
Back in 1941, with the memory of the Great Depression still weighing heavy, an American wrote into the Federal Reserve with an idea. “Would it not be feasible,” the member of the public asked, “to impose a Federal tax on the deposit of funds in bank checking accounts?”The writer is econ editor for SkyNews.
The reply from the Fed was polite but succinct: while there’s no doubt a tax on bank deposits would have “the advantage of administrative simplicity”, it is “not in accord with one of the fundamental principles of taxation in a democracy, namely, that taxes should be imposed in accordance with ability to pay”.
And that, when it comes down to it, is the most scandalous and worrying aspect of the overnight decision to impose a one-off levy on all bank deposits in Cyprus. There is no doubt the country is in big trouble: it was heading for a potential default and is in desperate need of another bail-out. However, trying to recoup some of the cash directly from bank deposits is a step across the financial Rubicon. Even in the depths of the euro crisis, none of the troubled countries had, until now, gone so far as to confiscate bank deposits. As the Fed said all those years ago, doing so involves arbitrary charges on those least equipped to afford them.
And so it will be in Cyprus. If you have anything up to €100,000 in a bank, by the time you next get access to your account on Tuesday (there’s a bank holiday on Monday) some 6.75% of your cash will have disappeared into the Government’s coffers to help keep the country afloat. That goes for everyone, from a pensioner to a small business owner to a millionaire (although Greek depositors get an exception). If you have more than €100,000 the charge is 9.9%.
In exchange, Cypriots will get a share in the relevant bank, equivalent to the value of the tax deduction – although this is unlikely to be of much consolation given the country’s current financial woes.
To make those distributional consequences even more egregious, the word from Brussels is that while depositors will get hit, the senior creditors who own bonds in the banks (including, naturally, some of the racier hedge funds) will escape scot-free....MORE
