The depositor haircut: German exit visa or just plain stupidity?
When I first heard of the bailout ‘soluton’ for Cyprus late Friday morning, my first inclination was not to believe it. But then I remembered a conversation with a Madrid source earlier in the week (it was about the Wolfgang Schäuble v Mario Draghi dogfight) and went back to him late Friday afternoon just to check my memory of the conversation was correct. It was: he’d more or less said that it was a fight between two people on mad missions – respectively, to control European fiscal management according to German needs, and to ensure that nothing and nobody would get in the way of the euro’s survival. Continue reading