Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I left off this chronology/linkfarm on Friday morning (eastern time) March 22, mentioning tough talk from Germany at that time. So we resume there.  That was also the morning when Greek banks swooped in to buy the units of Cypriot banks that operated in Greece.  For some reason this seemed to calm world markets. A bit later Friday, an EC spokesman, Simon O'Connor, announced "an improved spirit of cooperation on the part of the Cypriot authorities." Its parliament passed a law allowing it to restructure the failed  Laiki Bank , separating some of its assets into a so-called "bad bank." Under this plan, uninsured depositors would lose up to 40 percent o their savings, though the insured deposits would remain protected within the "good" bank. But this still left the question of raising the bail-in money that the Troika demanded . And by this time the crisis in Cyprus had analysts wondering about the next domino. One emerging markets researcher, ...

The Cyprus/bank/bailout story is big. Really big . Too much for me to handle in my own voice just now. So I'll just provide a few links, following chronological order, in this post and the next. The above photo is Cyprus' finance minister, Michael Sarris. By February 28, Cyprus was clearly 'next up,' the new center of the ever-shifting limelight in Europe's traveling crisis over banks and sovereign debts. The new president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, said that day that though Cyprus would have to negotiate terms of a bail-out, "no reference to a haircut on public debt or deposits will be tolerated." A big EU meeting in Brussels began on March 3d, and involved a good deal of discussion of the matters that Anastasiades had tried to wish off the table. Skipping ahead a bit ... by March 14th, EU officials, as well as those from the IMF, were in round-the-clock talks on a bail-out of Cyprus that would include a depositor sacrifice, known politel...