This.
Also, stop saying the ECB is controlled by Germany. There is a reason why one of the PIIGS is their president - Germany has barely any control at all, that's one of the main reasons the ECB has been willing to ignore all predefined rules, because Germany cannot stop that. Germany has two members in the ECB council, exactly as much as Luxembourg and Cyprus.
It's sad that some people feel entitled to German money/guarantees and any kind of demand suddenly constitutes a new Nazi oppression. You are forgetting what you are demanding: that other EU member's taxpayers should pay for you after your low-tax and high-interest economies failed. PIIGS' politicians act like without austerity everything would be fine but they forget that without intervention from the richer(*) states they would be totally bankrupt. Or maybe "forget" is not the correct word. They know that - they just put the blame on foreign powers to get re-elected.
(*) Germany isn't actually all that rich. IIRC German wages were the only ones within the EU to actually go down after the Euro implementation while Greece was at the top with some 40%. A recent study says German households are actually much much (factor 2 - 4) poorer than the average Italian, Spanish or French household. Germany was considered the "ill man" of Europe for a long time, while still being its biggest contributor, even during the time of the re-unification. Another recent study estimates some 45% percent of the all time net payings within the EU have been lifted by Germany alone. It does not matter whether you worked hard or whether your economy will go down the drain - that's mainly your own responsibility and just because you are an EU member it does not entitle you to anyone else's money.
There's also a nice quote by Dhomochevsky from the news thread to put things into perspective:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky
You can not really compare the banking situation in Cyprus with that in Spain, Italy and so on.
As you said, Cyprus is a tax haven and they were paying really high interest rates.
Something like 4% to 5%.
For comparison, the interest rate in Germany is about 0.4%, while the inflation rate is somewhere around 2%. This is about the same in other european nations. We non-Cyprus europeans are losing our banked money continuously all the time, due to sub inflation interest rates. And for some reason we are not yet lynching the bankers (shouldn't we start soonish?).
But now for some reason, the people in Cyprus are on the barricades, when even if they all lose 10% of their money, they would still come out ahead of any other european, if they had their money banked in Cyprus for 3+ years. This seems a bit hypocrite to me.
Add to this, that the non-tax haven europeans had to use a huge amount of their tax money, to bail out banks and uphold the banking system. A banking system that Cyprus greatly profits from. This too is money lost for us, even though it did not directly disappear from our bank accounts (it never got there in the first place).
Not so much lost for the people who used Cyprus as a tax haven, because well... that's the point of tax havens right? To not pay much taxes.
So with this in mind, I think it's understandable that I am not feeling a lot of sympathy to the people who have their money in Cyprus banks and are screaming 'EVIL EU' right now...
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