Category Archives: One-Foot Putts

Final score: Bears 8, Serviceberry 0.

Never hire bears to do tree trimming.  They do a lousy job and don’t clean up afterwards.

I don’t often comment (often? never!) on international topics, but this is one I can’t resist.  Cyprus is having a financial crisis.  To alleviate the crisis, the European Central Bank asked Cyprus to charge a “tax” on the deposits in Cypriot banks, where each depositor would pay 6.75 percent of the amount in his account.

It is incomprehensible to me what message the European Central Bank intends to send.  The only message I heard from this episode is this: if you are a European with deposits in any European bank, you can lose a chunk of your savings at any moment if your friendly Euro Council decides you need to help bail out the banks.  Rational people will respond by withdrawing their money and putting it under the mattress.  This will cause banks to crash and take the economy down with them.  What the hell are the Europeans thinking?

Hopefully the government of Cyprus will reject this and lurch to a better solution — but the fact that the European Central Bank even proposed such a measure is cause for concern.  Imagine if your bank told you that your account balances were cut by 6.75 percent and you had no recourse.  Would you ever put your money in a bank again?  Simply schaapachtig.