Margaret Thatcher: Her Master’s Voice

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis for Cartoon Movement http://www.cartoonmovement.com/p/6035

More than the bouffant hair, the handbags, the power suits and pussybow blouses, it was the voice that lingered.

For anyone growing up in the UK in the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher’s voice was unforgettable. Proceedings in the House of Commons were not televised until 1989 and, until then, TV news had to make to with displaying pictures of Parliament and playing audio of the debates, which often consisted of Thatcher swatting away her opponents with her polished vowels.

That memorable voice, though, was the product of elocution lessons, which were part of a wider effort to make Thatcher more appealing. This was not the only illusion of the Conservative leader’s time in power.

One cannot question that when she became prime minister in 1979, Thatcher took over a country in a steep decline. The economy was tanking, inflation was rising, industrial relations were mired and a general post-colonial malaise had descended over the UK. Getting out of this mess was an immense challenge.

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Cyprus: The eurozone’s omnishambles moment

Petros Karadjias/AP

At the beginning of last week, Cypriot politicians insisted they would not choose a “suicidal” option for their country. By the end of the week, they picked one that would inflict mortal wounds instead.

Nicosia’s handling of its unprecedented predicament has been cataclysmic. But the approach adopted by the European Union and International Monetary Fund to Cyprus’s problems has also been disastrous. The eurozone has been building up to an omnishambles moment throughout the debt crisis and it finally struck in a small island state in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The agreement arrived at in Brussels early Monday, following hours of talks involving Cypriot officials, eurozone finance ministers and EU and IMF chiefs, is being billed as the least worst option after all sides took successive wrong turns on the way. That may be the case but it will be little consolation to thousands of Cypriots who have lost a big chunk of their deposits and face uncertain times ahead.

Cyprus: It’s not about the numbers

The Eurogroup agreed on Monday night to allow Cyprus to change the make up of its controversial deposit tax. Instead of imposing a levy of 6.75 percent on savings under 100,000 and 9.9 percent on those above 100,000 – as agreed in Brussels in the early hours of Saturday – Nicosia can play around with the numbers, just as long as it raises the arranged amount of 5.8 billion euros.

Cyprus’s new but already beleaguered President Nicos Anastasiades is proposing that bank customers with deposits under 20,000 euros should not be taxed at all, while keeping the levy the same for the remaining depositors. Cypriot MPs have already shown a reluctance to approve the tax, mindful of the impact on depositors but also the long-term damage it could do to the island’s banking system and economy.

However, what’s happened over the past few days and what’s likely to happen in the days and weeks to come has little to do with numbers. It is much more about perceptions. Even if a financial meltdown is averted in Cyprus this week, the decision to tax depositors there in order to reduce the eurozone and International Monetary Fund contribution to the island’s bailout has sown the seeds for a future eruption.

After Cyprus, eurozone risks transmission failure and running out of road

The Eurogroup’s decision on Friday to impose a one-off tax on depositors in Cyprus may mark a turning point in the euro crisis. Only, the single currency’s decision makers might soon realize that in taking this particular turn, they also ran out of road.

Under pressure from several members of the eurozone – Germany in particular, if reports are accurate – the new Nicosia government agreed that deposits above 100,000 euros would be taxed 9.9 percent and those under 100,000 at a rate of 6.75 percent.

This is an unprecedented decision for a eurozone country. It is also one whose potential consequences reach much further than an island in the eastern Mediterranean. It threatens to cause the transmission system between the economic and financial sectors on one side and the political and social on the other to seize up. Without this, the euro cannot be propelled forward. It cannot function.

EU banking union a product of the euro crisis but also its solution?

There is a dirty little secret at the heart of the euro crisis and it concerns Europe’s banks. Many politicians and much of the media have focused their attention on the role sovereigns – particularly in southern Europe – had in triggering uncertainty and economic instability in the single currency area but the part banks played in laying depth charges at the euro’s foundations has been largely absent from public debate.

Yet, most places you look, eurozone banks have left their mark through a mixture of risky practices, undercapitalization, and over-exposure to government bonds and the US subprime market. Ireland is the most obvious case, where taxpayers have been asked to stump up about 70 billion euros to bail out reckless and troubled lenders. Spain has just asked for a 40-billion-euro bailout for its banks, which fuelled an unsustainable property boom through cheap credit in the previous years. The most prominent example of the short-termism and entangled interest that led to this imprudent lending was Bankia, formed by the merger of seven savings banks, or cajas, in 2010.

Bankia has so far absorbed 19 billion euros of taxpayers’ money, shed 50 billion euros of assets as part of a restructuring and cut 6,000 jobs. French-Belgian bank Dexia found itself in a similar situation. France and Belgium have so far spent about 15 billion euros rescuing the lender and provided up to 85 billion euros in state guarantees after it was caught short by its reliance on short-term financing in 2008 and then to Greek debt in 2011.