{"id":5463,"date":"2013-03-19T20:05:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T00:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=5463"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:14","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:14","slug":"what-is-belgian-for-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2013\/03\/what-is-belgian-for-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Flemish for Stupid?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t often comment (often? never!) on international topics, but this is one I can&#8217;t resist.\u00a0 Cyprus is having a financial crisis.\u00a0 To alleviate the crisis, the European Central Bank asked Cyprus to charge a &#8220;tax&#8221; on the deposits in Cypriot banks, where each depositor would pay <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/03\/18\/business\/global\/facing-bailout-tax-cypriots-rush-to-get-their-money-out-of-banks.html?pagewanted=all\">6.75 percent<\/a> of the amount in his account.<\/p>\n<p>It is incomprehensible to me what message the European Central Bank intends to send.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Rational people will respond by withdrawing their money and putting it under the mattress.\u00a0 This will cause banks to crash and take the economy down with them.\u00a0 What the hell are the Europeans thinking?<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully the government of Cyprus will reject this and lurch to a better solution &#8212; but the fact that the European Central Bank even proposed such a measure is cause for concern.\u00a0 Imagine if your bank told you that your account balances were cut by 6.75 percent and you had no recourse.\u00a0 Would you ever put your money in a bank again?\u00a0 Simply <em>schaapachtig<\/em>. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.bab.la\/dictionary\/dutch-english\/schaapachtig\"><strong><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t often comment (often? never!) on international topics, but this is one I can&#8217;t resist.\u00a0 Cyprus is having a financial crisis.\u00a0 To alleviate the crisis, the European Central Bank asked Cyprus to charge a &#8220;tax&#8221; on the deposits in &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2013\/03\/what-is-belgian-for-stupid\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-putts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5463"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28353,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5463\/revisions\/28353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}