‘Broken Trust of Money’

The best comment we’ve read on the collapse in Cyprus is the cartoon in the Interest Rate Observer, issued by James Grant, showing a bank teller looking out from behind her window. “Well, it was your money,” she is saying with a charming smile. “Now we need it.” The headline over the accompanying editorial is “The hardy flower of trust.” It disputes a headline on the Bloomberg wire saying: “Euro’s Cyprus Contagion Seen Contained Even by Bears.” Ideas, Mr. Grant demurs, are hard to contain. “A governmental skimming of bank deposits, imposed from afar on a Saturday morning and presented to the victims as a ‘stability levy,’ will, we think, be impossible to contain. The event will fade but the fact that it happened is indelible.”