Cyprus: curiouser and curiouser

First, one of the EU’s finance ministers suggested that the bank raids are not going to end with Cyprus.

Savers in the eurozone could see their bank accounts raided in the struggle to shore up the single currency, a senior EU official warned last night. The Cyprus rescue package – under which bank customers will have a chunk of their cash seized to bail out troubled lenders – could become a template for dealing with other creaking banking systems, Jeroen Dijsselbloem suggested. The remarks from the head of the eurozone’s finance ministers contradicted days of assurances that the Cyprus bank deposit raid was a ‘one off’.

Second, it appears that the news of the big 40% cash grab from uninsured depositors, (those with over EUR 100k in the bank), may be more than a little misleading, which may account for the strange silence from Russia over the last few days.  Zerohedge notes a Reuters report and postulates that the hot money which is supposedly the focus of the heist may already be well off the island.

As it turns out, these same oligrachs may have used the one week hiatus period of total chaos in the banking system to transfer the bulk of the cash they had deposited with one of the two main Cypriot banks, in the process making the whole punitive point of collapsing the Cyprus financial system entirely moot.

From Reuters: “While ordinary Cypriots queued at ATM machines to withdraw a few hundred euros as credit card transactions stopped, other depositors used an array of techniques to access their money.”

No one knows exactly how much money has left Cyprus’ banks, or where it has gone. The two banks at the centre of the crisis – Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, and Bank of Cyprus – have units in London which remained open throughout the week and placed no limits on withdrawals. Bank of Cyprus also owns 80 percent of Russia’s Uniastrum Bank, which put no restrictions on withdrawals in Russia. Russians were among Cypriot banks’ largest depositors.

So while one could not withdraw from Bank of Cyprus or Laiki, one could withdraw without limitations from subsidiary and OpCo banks, and other affiliates?

In other words, the idea that the situation has somehow been successfully resolved is not only ludicrous from a structural perspective- at most it would amount to one more round of successful can-kicking – but may not even be the case with regards to postponing the inevitable crisis and crackup.

It was always bound to happen

In a move that will surprise absolutely no one, Amynda Marcotte finally comes out of the closet:

What’s an ambitious woman to do? Obviously, the price tag put on your
employment is just another version of the pay gap, and for some reason,
the elegant solution of professional women refusing to have children
until someone fixes this situation has been taken off the table. It’s a
major conundrum. So why not look to men for answers? Men have managed
the sticky situation of both having a job and having a home life for
decades now. Their solution is possibly even more elegant in its
simplicity than the “don’t have children” one: Marry a woman. 

I think it became fairly obvious that she wasn’t cut out for a life of heteronormative happiness when she invented the concept of “near rape”, a term that customarily translates from the femmesprache as “first date”.

Education and the pretense of excellence

This is an example of why the much-ballyhooed predominance of women in education is not translating to meaningful real world success and why the disappearance of men from higher education is not tantamount to either their replacement by women or an inevitable decline into technological stagnation:

My best students were guys who weren’t really paying attention in class, they were doing the stuff on their own, and called me only for help. They were ahead of the program. I was ok with putting zero grades (F-) to the ones who didn’t care about learning the stuff. My take: if you can’t do this stuff, you ain’t gonna be making money with it on the real world, so why do you want a grade on it? Go do something else.

Nonetheless I got the “best teacher award” from the students four times in a row.

So. A couple of women protested and wanted to pass my course, on the basis that they had been attending to class and had done most of the assignments. Were they able to do the stuff? No. But they wanted recognition for their efforts. I got pushed by the directive board so I gave an A+ to everyone.

That’s some quality black-knighting there. It’s based on agreeing and amplifying. If pushed to delink genuine achievement and grades, then delink it entirely, don’t permit the retention of a convincing appearance of a nonexistent link. Education that recognizes efforts rather than results is not education, it is selling paper.

Remember, fraud is always based on deceit. Exposing the deceit to all and sundry is very nearly as effective as preventing the fraud from taking place.  And it is important to expose it, because allowing false excellence to be substituted for the real thing can have significant consequences, as the UK is discovering to its detriment.

The country’s top woman civil servant is clinging to her £180,000-a-year job after being accused by MPs of a ‘catastrophic failure of leadership’ on securing Britain’s borders. Lin Homer’s disastrous tenure in charge of the UK Border Agency lead to a huge backlog of hundreds of thousands of immigration cases. But astonishingly she emerged unscathed and was rewarded with promotion through the civil service and is now in charge of HM Revenue and Customs. The powerful home affairs committee today said they were ‘astounded’ she was considered suitable for the job of collecting the nation’s taxes.

It is hardly astonishing that the UK’s top woman civil servant wasn’t held accountable for her catastrophic failure, given the Prime Minister’s mandate to promote women at all costs.  As was the case in the class that Yohami mentioned, Lin Homer was rewarded with bonuses and promoted for her effort rather than her results… and now she is in charge of the nation’s tax revenues.

Cyprus: bank heist round 2

This time, sans the Cypriot parliament as EU plays its usual card of asserting “if you jokers can’t vote the way we tell you, we’ll just declare that voting is unnecessary“:

So having learned that Parliament would not approve a deposit levy in the name of a “tax”, and that the government was deeply opposed to forcing citizens and other depositors in its banks to bear losses without the bondholders being wiped out first as one would expect in the capital structure, Germany, the ECB and rest of the EuroThieves did something innovative.

They simply ignored Parliament and came up with a scheme that didn’t require a vote. We’ll see how this works out for them.

This, incidentally, is exactly what happened here with GM.  It was blatantly unlawful to protect the UAW’s pension fund, which had no senior standing while trashing senior bondholders.  The government did not care and did it anyway — and the courts permitted it.

This has been the repeated means by which you are stolen from.  When you enter into an investment, whether you make a deposit in a bank or buy a bond or something else, you are buying into a capital structure in a given place with a given and declared level of both risk and potential reward.  You price that risk and your willingness to enter into the transaction with the full understanding of where you are in that capital structure.

When that is unilaterally changed retroactively you are being stolen from. 

Period.

One can’t help but notice this is an even worse deal for the Russians than the one that had them announcing their new permanent Mediterranean fleet, and it doesn’t have the support of either the Cypriot people or their parliament. I wouldn’t get too excited and start going long the euro; contra the financial spin this situation is far from resolved.

It is awesome

I don’t think the socionomic implications of this song becoming a hit really need to be spelled out to anyone here.

Descent into barbarism

It may not be only the economic statistics that are fictional:

Flying in the face of the traditional image of a country seen as the land of good living, ‘France, A Clockwork Orange’ claims that mainstream politicians and the media have long masked a far more disturbing reality: it is rapidly descending into mindless violence and incivility. “Nobody should ignore the reality,” the book claims, namely that “every 24 hours 13,000 thefts, 2,000 attacks and 200 rapes” take place in France – figures far higher than official national statistics.

Now, I don’t spend much time in France, so I have no way of verifying who is telling the truth and who is hiding or exaggerating it here.  But the fact that the book has become a national bestseller tends to indicate that there is something amiss with regards to the reported French criminal statistics, especially since we know that the FBI’s criminal statistics are less than entirely consistent where racial matters are concerned.

But it is worth noting that just as cultural integration tends to split the difference between the criminal tendencies of different cultures, economic integration tends to split the difference between living standards.  The intellectuals on the Left are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they have made an epic mistake of historical proportions, in devaluing and ruining their own cultures under the mistaken impression that this would somehow be of benefit to the rest of the world.

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.

It’s not a question of fault.  It’s a question of actions and consequences. The best thing the West can do for the rest of the world is to preserve itself and serve as a positive example towards which it can aspire, not ruin itself in a futile attempt to transform other cultures through the magic of mass geographic relocation.

Everyone is an inequalitarian

Even the self-declared equalitarians.  How can we know?  Because, as I show at Alpha Game, even the most ardent nominal equalitarians often are, by their own inadvertent admission, observably inferior beings.

The hallmark of the inferior being is not hypocrisy, or the mere
appearance of hypocrisy.  Everyone with ideals fails to live up to them
at some point or another.  One’s failure to live up to a standard is not at all the same thing as denying the standard applies to oneself.  The hallmark
of the inferior, the sure sign of the self-admitted inferior, is the
individual who demands others live up to standards that he refuses to
accept for himself.

 Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Interracial relations in a nutshell

This anecdote effectively summarizes the African approach to all things European and explains why both multiculturalism and the White Man’s Burden were always doomed to failure:

The government was hoping to disenfranchise the estimated 30,000 white Zimbabweans by making those with actual or potential foreign citizenship actively choose to be Zimbabwean. But it mainly affected the more than one and a half million black Zimbabweans, many of them poor farmworkers, who had paternal links to the former Central African Federation and elsewhere.

How stupid.  And how quintessentially human. It doesn’t matter what quasi-human sub-species you happen to be.  It doesn’t matter if you are a white Soviet or a black Zimbabwean.  So long as you are more concerned with bringing down others than improving yourself, you will always fail.

The Euro has failed

So much for the idea that the EU and its euro would lead to more economic freedom rather than less.  Time finally ran out on what was always a vast con. Cyprus passes a law installing capital controls, thus prohibiting money transfers out of the country:

While it is unknown if the Cypriot parliament will agree to, and enact into law, the Troika-demanded deposit haircuts, after the shocking vote of mutiny against Merkel earlier this week that saw not one politician vote for the Europe suggested deposit tax levy (and even the ruling party abstained), a vote which will once more take place tomorrow, moments ago Cyprus became the first Eurozone country to officially implement governmental capital controls into legislation. At this point it had no choice: whatever happens with the deposit haircut, or with everything else, it is now inevitable that the local Cypriots will do all they can to pull as much money from domestic banking system as possible following the complete loss of faith and trust in banks, which is why the government had no choice but to intervene with its own “controls.” Sadly, this marks a milestone in the development of the Eurozone – it’s all downhill, and accelerating, from here.

Nor is the banking debacle limited to Cyprus any longer, as Spain has announced its intention to steal from Spanish depositors:  “the Spanish Minister of Finance & Public Administration announced this week a tax or bank levy (probably 0.2%) to be imposed on bank deposits, without details on which deposits will be affected or timing.”

It is time for the disastrous Euro experiment to end.  Now.  Bring back the Deutsche Mark.  Bring back the Franc.  Bring back the Lira.  The Euro has failed.

UPDATE: The news out of Cyprus just keeps getting better.

“According to the rapidly shifting plan, depositors with
the biggest local bank, Bank of Cyprus, may see losses up to 25%…. Cyprus’ second largest bank, Cyprus Popular Bank, aka Laiki bank, where it appears the bulk of Russian cash is stored, will fare far, far worse with
deposit haircuts up to a stunning 70% on the table, and that is after
capital controls ease enough to allow for the deposit withdrawals!”

How not to be SFWA president III

John Scalzi tweets concerning his admirable commitment to intellectual discourse: “I’ve blocked or muted an incredible number of appallingly stupid people today. Seriously, it must be a record.”

Of course, you have to keep in mind that McRapey defines “appallingly stupid people” as anyone who disagrees with him and dares to ask him a question that he is incapable of answering without exposing his intellectual limitations.  The Gamma Rabbit knows very well that he can’t hold his own in any environment where he can’t control the microphone.

Keep on keeping on, Johnny.