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zerohedge‏@zerohedge2 min So this is what "Positive Contagion" means... zerohedge‏@zerohedge3 min LSE’s de Grauwe Says Euro Area in ‘Deep Trouble’ zerohedge‏@zerohedge11 min Russia's Klepach says Cypriot situation unlikely to be resolved soon. So... March 25 deadline ixnay? erohedge‏@zerohedge23 min Euro Official On Cyprus: "Markets Believe We Will Find A Solution, This Might Not Be The Case" http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-21/euro-official-cyprus-markets-believe-we-will-find-solution-might-not-be-case-we-have zerohedge‏@zerohedge11 min Russia's Klepach says Cypriot situation unlikely to be resolved soon. So... March 25 deadline ixnay? Gregor Peter‏@L0gg0l1 min RT @NickMalkoutzis: #Tsipras: #Greece is not behaving like the motherland for Cypriots but the step mother

You don’t need to worry about the financial crisis in Cyprus sparking trouble for the U.S., according to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. European officials’ marathon efforts this week to head off a collapse of the tiny island nation’s banking system have raised fears that the renewed turmoil in the euro zone could threaten the gathering momentum in the U.S. housing and job markets. But Bernanke said that’s not likely. “We are monitoring very carefully but at this point we’re not seeing major risk to the U.S. financial system or the U.S. economy,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Slowly but surely we have seen the walls that once limited what government could do pulled down. Retroactive tax increases are now permitted. U.S. residents can be taxed as punishment for private services they choose not to purchase. Can confiscation of assets with due process, in the name of the greater national good be far behind—even though such a move would violate the constitutional protections we all currently enjoy? The welfare state is out of control and cannot pay its bills. It is writing checks it literally cannot cash, having to take out IOU after IOU to get the markets...

Cypriot parliament rejects ruling party request to postpone vote!!! PIMCO says it is cutting allocations to Eurozone after Cyprus deposit levy!!! zerohedge‏@zerohedge Cypriot parliament rejects ruling party request to postpone vote zerohedge‏@zerohedge PIMCO says it is cutting allocations to Eurozone after Cyprus deposit levy – PM https://twitter.com/zerohedge Juergen Baetz‏@jbaetz NICOSIA (@AP) #Cyprus’ Parliament’s speaker says vote on bank levy will go ahead today, despite delay request by the governing party. #sigh Cyprus parliament rejects deposit levy: reports http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cyprus-parliament-rejects-deposit-levy-reports-2013-03-19-14912938?link=MW_home_latest_news Former Cyprus Central Banker Goes Off On The EU And Says The European Project Is Dying “We are witnessing historic times. What...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed in a phone call with the president of Cyprus that his country hold talks only with international creditors on its bailout deal and not third parties like Russia, a government spokeswoman said on Tuesday. "A telephone call between Mrs Merkel and the Cypriot president took place yesterday evening," the spokeswoman told news agency AFP. " The chancellor once again emphasised that the negotiations are to be conducted only with the Troika," she added, referring to the term used for the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The comment was made...

Well, Cyprus rejected the bank deposit levy that rattled financial markets around the world. After all, if the EU/IMF can call for such an extreme tax on a nation’s depositors, where will they stop? March 20 (Bloomberg) — European policy makers must weigh how far to push Cyprus after lawmakers in the Mediterranean nation rejected an unprecedented levy on bank deposits, throwing into limbo a rescue package designed to keep it in the euro. Neil Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has an interesting take on the Cyprus problem: let Cyprus declare bankruptcy and leave the banks...

Cyrpus police outside of the parliament

Good morning and welcome back to the land of anarchy where contracts and guarantees don’t mean anything anymore. Over the weekend, as I’m sure you’ve already heard, Cyprus and the EU and the IMF (and the U.S. Treasury which is part of the official decision-making body at the IMF) all decided that it was in society’s best interests to confiscate the money in people’s checking and savings accounts. Not all of it, at least not yet.But as there’s a ton of confusion and misdirection about what this latest round of theft of private capital and descent into anarchy really is,...

Sir Mervyn King once said it was not rational to start a bank run but rational to participate in one once it has started. The governor of the Bank of England was right, of course. On Saturday morning, the finance ministers of the eurozone may well have started a bank run. With the agreement on a depositor haircut for Cyprus – in all but name – the eurozone has effectively defaulted on a deposit insurance guarantee for bank deposits. That guarantee was given in 2008 after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It consisted of a series of nationally co-ordinated guarantees....

Stock markets across Europe and Asia tumbled today as investors reacted to an unprecedented raid on bank accounts in Cyprus prompted by a £8.6billion bailout by the European Union. As the Cypriot parliament delayed a crucial vote on the measure for the second time, angry scenes erupted on the streets of the capital Nicosia. Protesters who stand to lose ten per cent of their savings stood outside the Parliament building holding anti-German banners which left doubt where they believe the blame lies for the latest crisis to envelope the eurozone. Meanwhile, many Britons who have moved to the Mediterranean island...

Cyprus --- officially the Republic of Cyprus --- is an island country in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria, Lebanon, northwest of Israel and north of Egypt.  I had to search Wikipedia for that information as I, like most of you, wasn't quite sure exactly where this island was.   This eurozone country, with population just north of one million, three-quarters of whom are Greek and most of the others Turkish, dominated the weekend financial news for those of us who were paying attention.  In a stunning shift from previous aid packages, EU...

Photos: protests in Nicosia • Crucial parliamentary vote delayed until Tuesday • Reports of a rethink on bank savings levy • Vladimir Putin: savings levy is unfair and dangerous • Midday: Markets claw back some losses

The Domino’s Are Falling: Europe Announces Stunning Bailout For Cyprus — Bank Depositors To Get Instant 10% Haircut Before Banks Reopen This Week! Biggest Bank Run In History Starts Monday!! Europe Does It Again: Cyprus Depositor Haircut “Bailout” Turns Into Saver “Panic”, Frozen Assets, Bank Runs, Broken ATMs http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-16/europe-does-it-again-cyprus-depositor-haircut-bailout-turns-saver-panic-bank-runs-br Cyprus bailout comes at a cost to bank depositors http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cyprus-bailout-comes-at-a-cost-to-bank-depositors-2013-03-16?link=MW_home_latest_news CYPRUS PRESIDENT: Nation Faces Total Financial Collapse And Euro Exit Without Bailout In the early hours of Saturday, Cyprus agreed to a “bailout” with the EU and IMF that is very controversial because it imposes an immediate one-time tax on everyone...

Two Of The Biggest Problems In The Financial System Will Hit In 2013 Stock-Markets / Financial Markets 2013Jan 14, 2013 - 03:11 AM By: Graham Summers This week is options expiration week: the week in which various call and put positions will expire. Wall Street is notorious for using these weeks to gun the markets this way and that in order to insure that the greatest number of puts and calls expire worthless. So expect the market to be even more volatile than usual this week. Outside of this, the investment world is slowly emerging from its Central Bank policy...

A failed plan to tax the rich at 75 percent. A glaring lack of global competitiveness. Famous actors trading in their French citizenship for Russian to avoid paying high tax rates. The news from Paris as of late has been a bit sensational, but also dire. Could France be the first northern country in the European Union to confront potential economic demise in 2013? Perhaps that assessment is not unlike Gerard Depardieu's highly publicized Moscow defection—a bit dramatic. But according to recent economic figures, there is some cause for concern. The French economy—Europe's second largest—grew at just 0.1 percent in...

Britain, and especially London, has become a popular place for tens of thousands of southern Europeans in search of work as the governments of Spain, Portugal and Italy continue to impose austerity measures. 5,350 Spaniards and 5,370 Italians were allocated national insurance numbers in London in the first quarter of 2012, according to The Times newspaper. The number of national insurance registrations for Spaniards across Britain has soared by 25% year on year. The unemployment rate is more than 25% in Spain. …

Germany’s Angela Merkel and other center-right leaders have indicated they would like to see Mario Monti to keep on running Italy instead of Silvio Berlusconi. The center-right leaders—as well as the two Italian political adversaries—met in Brussels ahead of an EU summit on Thursday (13 December) in an event designed to prevent Italy’s political turmoil from stirring up the euro crisis once again. The center-right European People’s Party (EPP) chief Hans Martens admitted to journalists he stage-managed the whole thing so that neither Monti nor Berlusconi knew the other would be there until the last minute to make sure that...

In the midst of the economic crisis, France’s Socialists are denying reality. The minister of industrial renewal is calling for nationalization of some industries, while the president shies away from necessary structural reforms. Business leaders fear the clock has been turned back 30 years. … France’s business leaders felt as if they had been set back 30 years, to a time when the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, François Mitterrand, began his term with a wave of nationalizations and, after two years, was forced to reverse his policy. Some even drew a comparison with 1945, when the government...

Transcribed from a speech given by Paul Singer of Elliott Management Investing is an art, more so than a science. And for me, what I get paid for is managing the “dark art,” if you will, of risk management and trying to be a visionary and having a dark vision at all times about what can go wrong. It’s a particularly fruitful and impactful time to be thinking about risk management and the thing I want talk about today is what I’ve described as “The Shape of the Next Crisis.” That doesn’t mean we’re going to be talking about the...

FRANKFURT: Bank lending to private households in the euro area, which has practically dried up in recent months, contracted again last month in face of the region's crippling debt crisis, European Central Bank (ECB) data showed on Wednesday. Eurozone bank loans to the private sector declined by 0.7per cent in October compared with the level in the same period last year after already shrinking by 0.9per cent the previous month, the European Central Bank said in a statement. President Mario Draghi has said that weak lending to the private sector reflected a pessimistic view of eurozone growth prospects and heightened...