[Editor’s note: Tim Price, frequent Sovereign Man contributor and Director of Investment at PFP Wealth Management in the UK, is filling in for Simon today from London, England.]
Like Lehman Brothers before it, Cyprus may well come to be seen not so much as the cause of further crisis but as yet another symptom of the ‘long emergency’ that continues to suffocate the western economies.
We would describe this emergency as, fundamentally, an inevitable crisis triggered by an unsustainable explosion of credit; western banks and western governments are now like Macbeth’s “…two spent swimmers, that do cling together / And choke their art.”
The prime minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, has provided two clear insights into this world of deceit:
“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.”
And,
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”
This is what we now have by way of government: a self-serving elite who cannot be trusted, operating to a timetable defined by, and limited to, the electoral cycle.
This liberty deficit is possibly more severely damaging than the supposedly intractable fiscal one that lies beneath it. Yet whatever emerges from the disaster, Cyprus has reminded us of a couple of awkward truths:
- A deposit in a bank is not a riskless form of saving.
We may not see eye to eye with the FT’s Martin Wolf on many aspects of modern economics and central banking in particular, but he described banks well last week:
“Banks are not vaults. They are thinly capitalised asset managers that make a promise– to return depositors’ money on demand and at par– that cannot always be kept without the assistance of a solvent state.”
- When states become insolvent, the piper must ultimately be paid. Fatal, embarrassing insolvency is not a problem that can be perpetually or painlessly deferred.
Cyprus matters not because of the size of its economy or because it is (for the time being) a member of the euro zone.
It matters because the inept handling of its crisis last week threw one facet of modern banking into sharp relief: if a deposit guarantee is seen to be fraudulent or sufficiently fragile to be easily smashed by politicians, then confidence in banks, and in unbacked paper currency itself, will be vulnerable to an unpredictable run.
CLSA strategist and financial market historian Russell Napier writes as follows:
“The key impact will be long term as the citizens of the Euro, like the citizens of the Soviet Union or the American colonies before them, eventually reject the sacrifice of political rights necessary to support the system.”
“When the history books are written, the Brussels-imposed sequestration in Cyprus will be seen as the tipping point when the citizens of the Euro system realized that the socio-political sacrifice needed to sustain a single currency was just too great.”
Actions have consequences. Cyprus may end up being a storm in a teacup. Like Russell Napier, we fear it may well be the start of something altogether more sinister.
If you have yet to consider the sanctity, stability, ‘store of value-ness’ and true safety of the paper currency you hold within the banking system, now might be a good time to start.
