We all watch what is going on in Cyprus - and wonder what the fall-out beyond that island will be for both Europe and beyond. The Cypriots say the Germans are to blame for their present plight. But are they? This piece in The Independent gives the low-down on how the Cypriots have no one else to blame but themselves for the predicament they now find themselves in.
"The German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is, apparently, “a fascist”. He has earned this epithet from a Cypriot newspaper for making the following observation about the bail-out of that country: “Anyone who invests money in a country where taxes are low and supervision is weak should suffer the consequences when the banks and the country itself cease to be viable.”
Tough? Yes. Lacking in even a glimmer of sympathy? Afraid so. But fascist? Come off it. Yet this sort of language – pointedly linking the current government in Berlin to that of the Third Reich – is now pervasive. Thus the President of the Cyprus Chamber of Commerce tells a German newspaper reporter that “financial genocide” is being carried out, with Cypriots as the innocent victims; and newspaper cartoons of Angela Merkel in storm-trooper uniform have become standard.
This was not so much financial genocide as suicide. It was not Germany – or indeed anyone else – who told Cypriot banks to offer much higher interest rates and its government to levy lower taxes on the proceeds than anywhere else, in order to attract hot money; it was not Germany who instructed those banks how to invest that money; and it was not even Germany who had made the suggestion – rejected last week by the Cypriot parliament – that even the smallest depositors in those collapsed banks should suffer a “haircut”.
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"The previous President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, was the former general secretary of the country’s communist party, and had spent a number of years in the good old USSR. It was under his leadership that Cyprus allowed itself to be used as a transit point for Russian arms shipments to the Assad regime (in violation of an EU arms embargo). It is in this context that we should see the decision of Angela Merkel to treat the Cypriot political establishment with less than complete warmth. Merkel, not only because of her experiences growing up in a satellite state of the USSR, has, to put it mildly, a profound distrust of the Russian way of doing political business; so she will be entirely unmoved by the Kremlin’s protests on behalf of singed Russian depositors – even if the great majority of those depositors are neither billionaire oligarchs nor crooks."
"The German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is, apparently, “a fascist”. He has earned this epithet from a Cypriot newspaper for making the following observation about the bail-out of that country: “Anyone who invests money in a country where taxes are low and supervision is weak should suffer the consequences when the banks and the country itself cease to be viable.”
Tough? Yes. Lacking in even a glimmer of sympathy? Afraid so. But fascist? Come off it. Yet this sort of language – pointedly linking the current government in Berlin to that of the Third Reich – is now pervasive. Thus the President of the Cyprus Chamber of Commerce tells a German newspaper reporter that “financial genocide” is being carried out, with Cypriots as the innocent victims; and newspaper cartoons of Angela Merkel in storm-trooper uniform have become standard.
This was not so much financial genocide as suicide. It was not Germany – or indeed anyone else – who told Cypriot banks to offer much higher interest rates and its government to levy lower taxes on the proceeds than anywhere else, in order to attract hot money; it was not Germany who instructed those banks how to invest that money; and it was not even Germany who had made the suggestion – rejected last week by the Cypriot parliament – that even the smallest depositors in those collapsed banks should suffer a “haircut”.
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"The previous President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, was the former general secretary of the country’s communist party, and had spent a number of years in the good old USSR. It was under his leadership that Cyprus allowed itself to be used as a transit point for Russian arms shipments to the Assad regime (in violation of an EU arms embargo). It is in this context that we should see the decision of Angela Merkel to treat the Cypriot political establishment with less than complete warmth. Merkel, not only because of her experiences growing up in a satellite state of the USSR, has, to put it mildly, a profound distrust of the Russian way of doing political business; so she will be entirely unmoved by the Kremlin’s protests on behalf of singed Russian depositors – even if the great majority of those depositors are neither billionaire oligarchs nor crooks."
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