At 10am Cyprus time, the Cypriot government started to hammer out another vote on whether they have a plan B to present to the European Central Bank. If they do not have an alternative to the mooted deposit tax by Monday, the bank will cut off emergency liquidity assistance to Cyprus’ two biggest banks, plunging them into bankruptcy, and putting Cyprus on a path which will inevitably lead them to an exit from the euro, and possibly the EU altogether.
Cyprus does not, currently, have a plan B.
The plans to be put in front of Parliament cover the winding up of Laiki, one of the two troubled banks (the other is the Bank of Cyprus), splitting it into “good” and “bad” banks, hopefully ensuring that the depositors in the good bank – those with insured deposits under €100,000 – do not immediately withdraw their money once the banks reopen.
That proposal has received a “cautious” response from eurozone finance ministers, according to the Financial Times, but doesn’t go anywhere near solving the problem.
In giving the Monday deadline, the European diplomats and ministers who ultimately hold sway over Cyprus also clarified their position about what an acceptable solution would be, and in doing so made things much, much worse.
We already knew that their initial proposal to the Cypriot government offered a loan of €10bn and required the government come up with a further €7bn itself in order to fund the €17bn needed for recapitalisation of the banks. But, reports Felix Salmon:
The stated reason why Europe won’t lend more than €10 billion is that Europe refuses to allow Cyprus’s debt level rise above a certain level.
That means that, at a stroke, most of Cyprus’ alternative solutions are bust. It can’t take a loan from the Russian government, it can’t borrow from its own pension funds, it can’t confiscate deposits and replace them with post-dated bonds.
The EU is basically confirming to Cyprus that its options are:
- Pass the deposit tax.
- Find some other tax which will get €7bn – a little under a third of GDP – in a weekend.
- Leave the eurozone.
In a way, though, the background situation has got better for Cyprus in the last week. On Monday, the country was deathly afraid of the deposit tax because it could have signalled the death of Cyprus as a destination for offshore banking. That appears to have been the reason why it took the disastrous choice to “spread the pain” by hitting insured depositors with a tax on top of uninsured.
Now, it doesn’t have to worry about that, because its role as an offshore banking destination is dead already. It is, bluntly, inconceivable that the “solution” to the crisis, whatever it is, won’t result in deposit flight from overseas depositors. The only hope left is to ensure that it doesn’t also result in Cypriots moving their money offshore.
With that in mind, it may turn out to be the case that the best solution for Cyprus is the one it was offered at the start: soak the (largely foreign) rich with a 15 per cent deposit tax, look after the poor’s deposits, and move on to trying to find an alternative basis for its economy.
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