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If Cyprus Really Wants To Be The Next Iceland...
Since Cyprus is currently here, in its contentious relationship with the Eurozone...

(h/t @FGoria via @TheEconomist)
Perhaps it will consider going the full monti and taking a page out of the full Iceland playbook
(h/t @estebiza)
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...there is revolution in the air... sang Bob Dylan
A hard rain's gonna fall.
steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king
Yeah, thats what I'm talking about!
I Pay in Blood (but not my own).
We may not be able to defeat these swine, but we don't have to join them.
..
To McMolotov: Read Richard Russell's Dow Theory Letters, I presume???
Do whats right for your people Cyprus, leave the Euro and stop stealing from your OWN people!
http://schiffblog.blogspot.ca/
Iceland isn't talked about much because the elite doesn't want people to start having any ideas like what they did. Bail out the people and imprison the bankers. That is nice.
Iceland, bitchez!
Isn't that the British chain that was selling horse meat?
Save a Nation, Jail a Banker!
Tasty too.
Save a Nation, HANG a Banker! There, I fixed it for you.
i've been saying this for years. see what good it's done?
violence- however ugly or productive- should be avoided, but it seems to be the only thing these cretins can relate to. hence, 1.6 billion rounds of ammo for DHS, etc. those bullets are not for skeet shooting, they're for us.
i say take this fight right to their door. lynch a banker in the parking lot of the bank, video to you tube, viral video, bankers will change their minds pretty fucking quick. this applies wherever there are banks. doesn't necessarily apply to iceland now...
i don't condone violence or violent revolution, but what we are experiencing here in the US is a passive violence, if there is such a thing. dunno what else to call it. the bankers quietly, slowly, incrementally take and take and take and write new rules in secret to take and take some more, citizenry be damned. the brainwashed/conditioned herd seems to be okay with this passive violence. the off-the-beaten-track-ers don't especially care for it, me included.
...but there are other ways of getting the point across. pulling out of the system- to the extent that one can- is one way. off-grid is another. everyone here who is a faithful reader knows the many ways, i'm not going to list them all. they've been repeated here ad nauseum (thankfully).
i was 20 when nicolae ceausescu + wife were lynched in the town square. i was young and naive and absolutely dumbfounded by that event. i'll never forget it.
bankers have forgotten this, i think, for the most part. they'll push and push and over-reach and push and push, not giving a flying fuck about who they put on the street, whose home or property they steal.
tax levy on bank deposits? the sheep might buy that, but i don't, and neither do most ZHers. it's outright theft. you steal a candy bar here and you go directly to jail, no questions asked. a banker steals money and property and savings and people's futures they get a fucking bonus and/or promotion.
lynching video to you tube.
europe, have you forgotten december 25th, 1989???
Sen. Coburn, one of the better representatives said that DHS only bought 103MM rounds in 2012 and that it was down from 2011, and that they are authorized to buy 1.6B but didnt actually buy them. More likely most the ammo is being bought up buy 100mil gun owners in the US. Personally I reload, cheaper and more reliable. So either they lied to him or this is just a conspiracy theory
Do you think this administration might lie to him?? Noooooo way! They are honest and transparent. They are just too busy to comply with all those FOIA demands, They have a big money printing job to do, and millions of guns to confiscate.
well, many of us have not forgotten the bloodshed that started with the murder of Jürgen Ponto in 1977, and the German Autumn that followed
little buddy buys the dips, I find those comparisons across the Atlantic were difficult - in many ways we do live in different worlds
STARVE THE BEAST!!!
I thought they fucked UK,NL savers.. riped people savings....and never jailed important To big to fail... instead they become Iceland government. Watch Inside Job...
Yeah, imagine the outrage on Zerohedge if they announced that they would be taking the money from anyone who is not a Cypriot; all citizens and residents get 100% of their deposits, and the loses are spread evenly to all foreigners. Not really any better than saying "all of the loses will be taken from accounts over 100,000 Euros".
+1 morals differ from case and person, eh? ;-)
The euro drama is starting to remind me of the never ending serial movies/tv shows. Main character is in burning car hanging off cliffs edge not sure how he/she will be saved but seems to happen every week. I'm to the point I want the cliff to win.
The cliff has already won. Wile E. Coyote is just running through the air.
it's too late! The rest of Europe ought to jump that sinking Euro-ship before the leaders start sending in German Wehrmacht heads south to get 100% of deposits
http://goldsilverbitcoin.com
American accounting firms were involved in auditing Iceland's banks before they blew up. Are they in jail?
Funny that. Didn't they also 'advise' Greece, Italy, Cyprus ..... God's work!
Iceland or Cyprus doing their own thing is not enough to bring the house of cards down on their own. You need two fires at the same time to bring the show to an end.
Mark my words, Germany will be the greater casualty when everything is resolved.
What amazes me about this whole financial fiasco is that it is an entirely man-made problem. There are no tsunamis (apart from Japan of course) washing up onto every country's shores, no asteroids from space, no droughts, plagues, locust infestations, magma-spewing volcanoes or even frogs dropping from space. This entire thing is a creation of man. As such, I have a question (no doubt a very silly one): if practically every country across the entire world has debt, why doesn't everybody just cancel their debt at the same time and start anew? Why is that so hard? Everybody has debt = everybody forgives their debt = sunshine, rainbows and unicorns. What am I missing here?
You seem to think they want these "problems" to go away.
No, it is about control.
They have more every day.
It's going "great" in their eyes.
Look how much attention they are getting; how much power they are seizing; how all people must pay attention to them; how everyone must bow before these un-elected rulers-of-the-world.
Things are going great.
I'm not joking.
But, to answer your question directly, "debt" is about leveraged-control. The debt will be re-structured in a manner to pick "winners" and "losers", by rewarding friends and punishing enemies. So, it will actually happen -- the debt will be cancelled (in part, and restructured-in-part).
Unfortunately, though, the "taxpayer" is not anyone's friend (in particular). Rather, expect to see "cancellation" as increased centralization of power and resources/money into the hands of the few. Such as is the case in any totallitarian society.
STARVE THE BEAST!!!
Peak oil.
You forget that the debt is owned by the very few and very powerful as a means of control and as a means to fulfilling a greater agenda. These people are not writing anything off unless you die and leave nothing behind.
I do think of this often, and I too am amazed. If humans are so ill equipped to solve man made problems, how could they possibly navigate a natural made disaster. Then again you might consider our brief human existence to be just a universal phenomenon, and our current man made disaster is nothing but a full blown global natural disaster derived from the human collective consciously lossing its way on a massive fucking proportion.
You, as a healthy and thinking person, are right to be "amazed".
You want to *avoid* disasters, and address problems when disasters happen, to alleviate suffering.
You are clearly not a sociopath, nor a psychopath. Their motivations are different. Most (healthy) people fundamentally do not understand this concept.
Sociopaths and psychopaths self-select to these "ruling-class" positions. Normal people would rather build or create things, and spend time coaching sports for their children.
I agree that the "human collective conscious" is the basis for this problem. People now think-and-behave like children, giving up all their individual sovereignty. Their wishful thinking, abdication of responsibility, and deference to authority has turned them into pets. And, they are now sad that their "supper-dish" is empty.
Governments do not have this authority that governments are claiming. People are not obliged to tolerate tyrants, no matter what the tyrants think of themselves.
The proper answer is for people everywhere to no longer acknowledge the authority of these organized-crime leaders that behave like mere petty warlords.
+1 for underlining that sovereign means, ultimately, grown-up
and sovereignty rests in the people, and governments need to be reminded of that, and for this you need citizens, not only consumers
the bitter pill to swallow is that if you allow a psychopath to power then it's your responsability, too - except if you are a child or pet, that is
W00dman, you have a valid point. Because economic systems are man made, they can be altered, redefined, etc. to any extent possible. It's just choosing who the winners and losers will be, and naturally, the current winners are very wealthy and powerful, and their proposed changes to the system are mostly intended to keep the current system going with minimum modification. But, when a system becomes too unwieldy or complex, other forces pop up, like major defaults and bankruptcies, or wars or revolutions, which force even the PTB to loose control to a new group of PTB.
The great hope in the ZH audience is that such a major reset is forced upon the system. Then, it is presumed that the new system will be superior to the old, and run by better people. It's my view (guess) that the economic system will not face the day of reckoning, and that it will simply continue to morph, year by year, with currency devaluations, more governmental control, with newer, younger sociopaths at the wheel.
Systems are slowly corrupted until they fail completely and collapse, only then will a new system be put in place. There is no small fixes that will amend years of carefully designed malfunctions that benefit the few.
The debt is someone else's asset, and the people with all the assets are also the ones with the power over the decision making
"Please hold onto your cards. B-I-N-G-O has been called."
Debt is an illusory asset, no real substance. predicated upon a debtor's desire, willingness, or ability to service the debt. Interest bearing debt is an accomodation to fiat devaluation and bankster greed and avarice...faux Hebrew/Babylonian/Khazarian fleecing of the productive masses..immoral, usury,....should be illegal....a hanging offense. A primary, foundational cause of all man-made conflict and wars.
The old testament gave us rules for human behavior in such matters. The Babylonian Talmud twisted those rules into schemes for enslavement and lifelong abuse of the non-Talmudic populations. The primary reason that the faux-Hebrews have been forcibly/ethnically removed from nearly every nation on earth.....until now...when they finally have control of every western nation central bank on earth and have nearly destroyed the nations in pursuit of their new world order.....currently processing and waiting in the wings.
STARVE THE BEAST!!!
@w00dmann: when all debts are canceled, all deposits cease to exists as well.
Since I've no debt and at least some deposit, I wouldn't consider this a fair deal. Besides without any cash on the side, I don't know how to pay my rent. How are my clients suppose to pay for my work?
There is no painless way, it's all about the distribution of pain. And it is going to take at least another decade if not more.
Your premise requires an entire reset of the system - Deposits and debt gone at the same time - or what I like to call the ZEROHEDGE FINAL SOLUTION.
Barter folks, no taxes!!! Value for Value, no capital gains or income!!!
STARVE THE BEAST!!!
The distribution of pain, or the redistribution of wealth?
"everybody forgives their debt"
you wish. even if one refuses the plan, the plan collapses. and rest assured nobody would be willing to do it at this point. it is impossible.
if it was only debt without leverage & without massive trade imbalances, I think they would.
If debt cancellation only worsens a trade imbalance they have no incentive.
If debt cancellation triggers further debts from default-swaps THAT further questions who's fx-valuation and trade-balance is too far out of line and how it will be settled: cash, gold, default, war, land acquisition, energy (of course war accomplishes these things at a price).
Then ponder a bit on this: countries don't exist (in material reality). Only individuals exist, with a varying degree of power...
It works if you work it.
is it me or is this all about merkel and her re election? the whole thing?
We have our first nominee for the Franz Ferdinand Memorial Bullet-Catcher Award...the ArchDUCK!
I have learned over the years that out of balance systems tend correct themselves eventually... Time is an illusion just like this circus we are seeing, but it is only a matter of time. Tick tock bitches...
Sometimes that correction is a collapse without any restoration & the nearby economies feed on the corpse for their own benefit.
If the Cyprus government capitulates to the troika the people are stuffed.
If they tell the troika to to get stuffed, they'll still get stuffed.
So whatever happens they are stuffed,
So tell the troika to fuck off and stuff them at the same time.
When the troika realise they're going to be stuffed (perhaps in a suitcase at the bottom of the Med ) they'll come up with the whole 15 billion whatever Merkel says.
Free Money
Sorry folks, free money doesn’t work. Putting money to work is a sales pitch. Money is debt leverage, which depends upon borrowing from future generations, and the kids are passively revolting, because work, actually doing something productive, doesn’t pay.
If you want to watch an economy die, which the majority is doing, put money in a bank and live off real estate price inflation, hoping to die before the ATMs run out of money. America is Cyprus/Japan on a very large scale, which is why the latter is the current financial arbitrage prototype.
The US dollar has fallen from 1/35th of an ounce of gold to 1/1600th. The soup is simply being diluted. Welfare is designed to provide continuing, artificial, demand for corporations, not working people. The corporation is designed to minimize cost, and labor is assumed to be a cost. Free money excludes, replaces, labor revenue, the feed.
Machines are given accelerated depreciation treatment, the Fed digitally prints and gives money to the banks globally, which becomes corporate revenue at 40X leverage, and the majority assumes the US military will continue protecting the system, while cutting it to pay for social services, which will only contract faster as a result. It’s the greatest ponzi ever built…and it’s collapsing.
Look around, drug economies don’t work. The only possible outcome is a game of pop-goes-the-weasel, last-man-standing in a closed win-lose regulatory construct, which all participants eventually lose, first their spirit, then their intellect, and then their bodies.
There is no money of any value in the pension system. It has been diluted to negative cash flow with negative real interest rates, and that money has to come from somewhere. Benanke is a janitor, hosing away recurring middle class income to pay near-term middle class pensions, upon which the landed wealthy depend as a buffer against its own replacement.
A federal government depends upon state governments, which depends upon local communities, and this (Fort Bragg, CA) and every other community now depends upon patronage to state and federal governments, which can only form a global government in their attempt to temporarily get out from under all the debt, which isn’t being paid, not even the interest, if you look at the system globally, or Cyprus in particular.
There are all kinds of things that need to be done in your community, and people capable of doing them. The problem is price discovery, all the false assumptions associated with empire economics. Pot, or any other drug, is not an economy, but who am I to say so?
I am just a guy who has been passing through the gap since the 70s, watching the Jerry Brown crowd, and its insane debt leverage expansion, come to power. America has long passed the ability to enforce contraction on the minority with electronics, to preserve the majority, which is being uprooted accordingly.
The argument for free money collapses quickly in world war, and the argument in favor of free money can only lead to world war. So far, most of the damage is occurring in Europe, as the Fed contracts it ahead of domestic contraction, hidden behind accounting numbers to maintain the relative status quo, which is all the peer pressure status groups can compute.
If you want to Celebrate Recovery while bombs are falling on your head, that’s your business. You can’t eat pot, any other drug, or manufactured food to produce health, which is why America has the most irrational healthcare system, the greatest cost for the lowest overall health, on the planet.
When war comes, and it always does, who do suppose will build the necessary instrument to end it? And who do you suppose will benefit? Have you seen the default rate among universities? They were built to justify income inequality, not to mitigate it, as the positive feedback outcome attests. When time comes, America will not be the beneficiary. History tells you that.
There are no more growing slave populations on the margin to capitalize, and the real imbalances are growing accordingly. Everyday another house empties and another person is looking from the outside in. Local conditions continue to deteriorate, but the media publishes the economic good news. You might want to get busy and give young people with skills a reason to stick around and have kids, but you do what you want, continue to fight for the best chairs on the Titanic.
The US dollar is the greatest money laundering scheme in History.
How right you are. And here's when it was made abundantly clear, in all too typical US Empire fashion:
That was then, however, and this is now. And now has barely begun to assert itself.
assuming this wasn't plagerized from someone else with out attribution.. great post. thank you
Avg salary in 1930, $1368/yr..~40oz of gold...in 2012, $47k or 30oz of gold.
Can't wait to tell grandpa how fucking good "he had it compared to me".
Man, I need to buy you a motherfuckin' beer and some medicinal marijuana. Maybe we can brainstorm on how we capitalize off this shit.
Ok... again, ARE WE SURE?
Of course they aren't sure but it certainly sounds good. Truth is Iceland threw "the people" to the wolves...or, rather, vulture funds. Bit long but following excerpt from http://www.globalresearch.ca/vulture-capitalism-iceland-s-new-bank-disaster/27673 is a much more accurate description than the "jailed bankers, bailed people" bologna:
---------------------------------
Stuck with bad loans and bonds from bankrupt issuers, foreign investors in the old banks sold their bonds and other claims for pennies on the dollar to buyers whose web sites described themselves as “specializing in distressed assets,” commonly known as vulture funds. (Persistent rumors suggest that some of these are working with the previous owners of the failed Icelandic banks, operating out of offshore banking and tax havens and currently under investigation by a Special Prosecutor.)
At the time when those bonds were sold in the market, Iceland’s government owned 100% of all three new banks. Representing the national interest, it intended for the banks to pass on to the debtors the write-downs at which they discounted the assets they bought from the old banks. This was supposed to be what “fair value” meant: the low market valuation at that time. It was supposed to take account of the reasonable ability of households and businesses to pay back loans that had become unpayable as the currency had collapsed and import prices had risen accordingly.
The IMF entered the picture in November 2008, advising the government to reconstruct the banking system in a way that “includes measures to ensure fair valuation of assets [and] maximize asset recovery.” The government created three “good” new banks from the ruins of its failed banks, transferring loans from the old to the new banks at a discount of up to 70 percent to reflect their fair value, based on independent third party valuation.
The vultures became owners of two out of three new Icelandic banks. On IMF advice the government negotiated an agreement so loose as to give them a hunting license on Icelandic households and businesses. The new banks acted much as U.S. collection agencies do when they buy bad credit-card debts, bank loans or unpaid bills from retailers at 30% of face value and then hound the debtors to squeeze out as much as they can, by hook or by crook.
These scavengers of the financial system are the bane of many states. But there is now a danger of their rising to the top of the international legal pyramid, to a point where they are in a position to oppress entire national economies.
Iceland’s case has a special twist. By law Icelandic mortgages and many other consumer loans are linked to the country’s soaring consumer price index. Owners of these loans not only can demand 100% of face value, but also can add on the increase in debt principal from the indexing. Thousands of households face poverty and loss of property because of loans that, in some cases, have more than doubled as a result of the currency crash and subsequent price inflation. But the IMF and Iceland’s Government and Supreme Court have affirmed the price-indexation of loan principal and usurious interest rates, lest the restructured banking system come to grief.
This is not what was expected. In 2009 the incoming “leftist” government negotiated an agreement with creditors to relate loan payments to the discounted transfer value. On IMF advice, the government handed over controlling interest in the new banks to creditors of the old banks. The aim was to minimize the cost of refinancing the banking system – but not to destroy the economy. Loans that were transferred from the old banks to the new after the 2008 crash at a discount of up to 70% to reflect their depreciated market value. This discount was to be passed on to borrowers (households and small businesses) faced with ballooning principal and payments due to CPI indexing of loans.
But the economy’s survival is not of paramount interest to the aggressive hedge funds that have replaced the established banks that originally lent to the Icelandic banks. Instead of passing on the debt write-downs to households and other debtors, the new banks are revaluing these loan principals upward. Their demands are keeping the economy in a straight jacket. Instead of debt restructuring taking place as originally hoped for, the scene is being set for a new banking crisis.
Both articles pretty much say the same and the conclusion seems obvious: that's the actual Icelandic reality, which means Iceland is actually in a much worse situation than the countries who supposedly should look towards it as an example... and that begs to wonder who in hell is actually behind such propaganda and with what real intent?
Either way, it seems obvious the only solution to break out of this imbroglio is to drop out of the banking system as quick, as much and in whatever way possible, even taking losses.
Governments have authority to arrest and jail thieves and assholes. One of them needs to grow a pair like Iceland and do it, even if it's from the fear of God from the locals.
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong but the Icelandic government was quite willing to ass rape their own countrymen.
Unfortunately for them, the general population had other ideas.
All this talk about Iceland doing the right thing is very misleading.
They were forced kicking and screaming
That the government of Iceland was forced by the people, to be accountable to the people, still speaks highly of, and commends Iceland's government and people above most other Nation's of the world.
So, somebody twisting my arm up my back to make me do the right thing makes me a hero ?
Respect is due to the average Icelander who got off his/her arse to demonstrate in the streets.
Respect due to the government.....less so.
When the finance guys come callin' there is no choice for the people besides rising up.
Look at the WTO and IMF and their dastardly deeds in Latin America and Africa and now it has come to the southern European states. First they suck out all the people's money, then they make the country cough up all the public resources which include both natural resources AND public treasures AND public necessities such as water systems.
ALL THESE treasures go to the corporate vultures. Government officials are complicit in this theft. The people are left to DIE. These people DO NOT CARE HOW MANY PEOPLE DIE.
I have not seen them go after white nations YET to the degree of nations with non whites but there isn't as much left of the world anymore so I say, GET READY, they are coming.
Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight
He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.
Dip.
"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."
-Travis Bickle
Every country that defaults ends up recovering quickly.
What does that tell you?
Make the banksters eat their foul cooking!
Money flows to power, and the banksters are now at the center of everyone’s universe, with their hands on all the dials and levers, front running every tuning adjustment they make for additional profit.
“One vast and ecumenical holding company,
For whom all men will work to serve a common profit,
In which all men will hold a share of stock,
All necessities provided,
All anxieties tranquilized,
All boredom amused”
Network, 1976
Unfortunately, we all know how this ends for Howard Beale, the voice and spirit of humanity and the common man. He gets sacrificed on live TV, the modern day Colosseum, takes five slugs to the chest in a blaze of gunfire, and dies.