This is a solution to the banking crisis in Cyprus. However, it might be termed as daylight robbery by some. What else can a bankrupt nation do? Go the Zimbabwean way and change to US currency? That would be too extreme. Plus you are disrupting the sovereign composition of the country. Woe to anyone who thinks about that as a solution.
But what else was the Cyprus government to do but tax bank deposits? One day you will be looking at your bank balance and next day you find that steadily it has been wiped out. The government has been taxing your bank deposits. Tut tut. Not done.
Here, in India, if it was implemented it would have drawn howls of protest. We value our hard-earned money as our own and the government can go to a bad place, which I won’t name. As such we sold our gold when there was a liquidity crunch and people said we were “selling family jewellery.” We we value our gold jewellery, you see.
Go behind any deficit budgeting nation and you can see the looming crisis. The US budget deficit is more than 1 trillion, which is more than a 1000 billion. The congressmen won’t let Obama cut this deficit. And if US banks go belly up, one can imagine what would happen to the world.
So, it is apocalypse for now. The end of the world will not only be due to fire or water but could also be through a financial meltdown.