Ellen Brown: And it's
not just us individually, but our public monies, our State and local government
monies, could also be confiscated. What
happened in Cyprus was that their two big banks are bankrupt. Although, that's actually highly fishy,
because a couple of weeks earlier, they were actually given a pass, they passed
the stress test. So one wonders (if you
want to get real conspiratorial, but anyway) whether it wasn't even just a test
case of these new bail-in policies that have been popping up all over the
world. They emanate from BIS (Bank of
International Settlements), the "Financial Stability Board" that we all signed
on to be regulated by with the G20. We
signed onto that in 2009 after the credit collapse.
So the Financial Stability Board has said that
everybody has to have these bail-in policies ready. The bail-in policies basically say, "We
acknowledge that governments are not going to bail out the big banks
anymore." You can see that in
Iceland. I'm guessing that Iceland actually
triggered all of that. So Iceland was
the first to say, "Forget it. We're not
paying," and now the Dodd-Frank Act allows the big banks to play with
derivatives, but it says "we're not going top bail you out. The taxpayers are not going to bail you out
if you have a big derivatives bust."
So we, the United States, have also said we're not
going to bail out the big banks anymore, and in the EU, theoretically under
this thing called "The European Stability Mechanism," the EU Euro-zone
countries are supposed to bail out their banks.
But they have now said they're not going to do it either. And so that's why I think - well, there was a
Dutch finance minister that said that Cyprus is going to be the model in the
future for future bank collapses, that they're going to do bail-in rather than
using the European Stability Mechanism to require the countries to bail out the
banks.
Rob Kall: So what
that means is that instead of the banks protecting depositors (average people
and small businesses), what they're going to do is they're going to basically
take the money from those people, and they're going to give it to the banks
that have invested in these highly speculative, synthetic derivatives. Is that right?
Ellen Brown:
Right. Instead of saying, "The
problem is the big banks and we've got to get rid of them," the goal here is
always to keep those big banks afloat.
The question is: the governments aren't going to bail them out anymore,
so the presumption is, "They have to survive, and so how do we allow them to
survive?" Well, now they will go after
their creditors' money. But the
creditors are the people that they owe money to, so it basically means they're
just going to keep the creditors' money and not give it back. Well, the creditors, the biggest class of
creditors are the depositors. The
depositors are supposedly protected by insurance; so we have FDIC insurance,
and in Europe they have similar sorts of insurance. The EU protects it's depositors with up to a
hundred thousand Euros. Our insurance
goes up to $250 thousand.
What they did originally in Cyprus when these two
banks -- Cyprus itself (the country) needed a further loan (they're in economic
trouble), so they needed a loan from the ECBEU IMF: the Troika. And the Troika said they would give it only
on condition that these banks were bailed out by bailing them in: in other
words, by a tax on the depositors' money.
Originally it was a tax on all the depositors, including the insured
depositors. Well that was just the
ordinary little people, so the people took to the streets and they said
"Absolutely not"; and the politicians refused to approve it, they voted it
down, which was good of the Cyprus
politicians, the Cyprus government. So
it wasn't the fault of the Cyprus government; it was the fault of the Troika,
these unelected Technocrats that are running the whole show there.
Rob Kall: What do
you mean running the show there? Running
what show, where?
Ellen Brown: The ECB is
the European Central Bank, and the EC (the Europeans Commission) is the
governing body of the EU. The IMF, of
course is - it's been called the collection agency for the banks, but it's the
big bank that -- I think it's actually the World bank that originally makes
these loans, but the IMF goes in and collects, (laughs) takes the money and
works out the funding arrangements.
Anyway, so that's the Troika.
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