Quotulatiousness

April 1, 2013

Canadian government pre-approves Cyprus-style haircuts for bank depositors

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Not only can it happen here, but Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is making it explicit that it will happen here:

The politicians of the western world are coming after your bank accounts. In fact, Cyprus-style “bail-ins” are actually proposed in the new Canadian government budget. When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons.

This new budget actually proposes “to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks” in Canada. “Economic Action Plan 2013″ was submitted on March 21st, which means that this “bail-in regime” was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted. So exactly what in the world is going on here? In addition, as you will see below, it is being reported that the European Parliament will soon be voting on a law which would require that large banks be “bailed in” when they fail. In other words, that new law would make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation the law of the land for the entire EU.

I can’t even begin to describe how serious all of this is. From now on, when major banks fail they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts. This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the western world.

What you are about to see absolutely amazed me when I first saw it. The Canadian government is actually proposing that what just happened in Cyprus should be used as a blueprint for future bank failures up in Canada.

Sneak peek into the Guild Wars 2 April update

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:44

At GuildMag, Ollannach has an exclusive scoop on what we’ll be seeing in the April patch for Guild Wars 2:

In an upcoming exclusive GuildMag interview, ever-smiling Colin Johanson spilled the beans on a major part of the upcoming April patch! While details are as scarce as ever, Colin let us know that along with the conclusion of the Flame & Frost series, we’ll be seeing a major overhaul to Guilds and the introduction of Guild versus Guild. Colin gave us a private scoop on how Guild versus Guild will play out in Guild Wars 2.

QotD: The Social Democratic Moment

Filed under: Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The 1960s saw the apogee of the European state. The relation of the citizen to the state in Western Europe in the course of the previous century had been a shifting compromise between military needs and political claims: the modern rights of newly enfranchised citizens offset by older obligations to defend the realm. But since 1945 that relationship had come increasingly to be characterised by a dense tissue of social benefits and economic strategies in which it was the state that served its subjects, rather than the other way around.

In later years the all-encompassing ambitions of the Western European welfare state would lose some of their appeal — not least because they could no longer fulfill their promise: unemployment, inflation, ageing populations and economic slowdown placed insuperable constraints upon the efforts of states to deliver their half of the bargain. Transformations in international capital markets and modern electronic communications hamstrung governments’ capacity to plan and enforce domestic economic policy. And, most important of all, the very legitimacy of the interventionist state itself was undermined: at home by the rigidities and inefficiencies of public-sector agencies and producers, abroad by the incontrovertible evidence of chronic economic dysfunction and political repression in the Socialist states of the Soviet bloc.

Tony Judt, “The Social Democratic Moment”, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005

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