Showing our depositors' accounts?

The depositors will be waiting.

Norway owns the mountain and the facility, but the depositors own the seed.

It belongs to our depositors and we can't gamble with it. I'll remember, Mr. Milton.

Depositors in the Bank had demanded that the Government guarantee full repayment of their deposits.6

Right in back is a fancy cabinet containing bottles... for offering drinks to the rich depositors.

By contrast, the proposal to impose losses on small Cypriot depositors had no redeeming justification whatsoever. As in Ireland, the most vulnerable were being asked to take the hit, while large depositors were let off lightly and other lenders were to be spared.

Indeed, the proposal amounted to a rupture with the near universal agreement that small depositors should be considered sacrosanct. After all, televised news footage of panicked depositors in long lines outside banks and at ATMs can cause immeasurable financial damage far beyond a country s borders.

It was explained that such receivables involved single, large or small amount, claims of depositors against the depositary institution.

Given this situation, the logical choice for the country should have been clear if the government wanted to survive, foreign depositors must bear part of the losses. It is thus difficult to understand why the Cypriot government was at first so reluctant to inflict any losses on depositors.

Over the past year, progress was made towards implementing the European Union s Deposit Guarantee Directive (94 19 EC), to provide protection for bank depositors.

And we're going to have such a line of customers seeking and getting small loans that people will think we're gambling with the depositors' money.

ATHENS The Cyprus bailout deal is a watershed in the unfolding eurozone crisis, because responsibility for resolving banks problems has been shifted from taxpayers to private investors and depositors. But imposing major losses on Cypriot banks depositors violates the deposit insurance guarantee that forms part of the proposed European banking union, while the imposition of capital controls further erodes the monetary union s foundations.

In all these cases, the liability holders i.e., the depositors have been promised liquidity, yet that promise cannot be kept if it is ever doubted. It is being doubted now.

The Panel notes that the banks in Iraq, for reasons unrelated to the depositors, continued receiving funds from the workers for transfer and issued payment orders after 5 April 1991.

Glass Steagall aimed to prevent commercial banks from gambling with their depositors money by mandating the institutional separation of retail and investment banking. The result was 65 years of relative financial stability.

One Member State said that as a result of the freezing of the assets of the listed entity Al Barakaat, unlisted depositors could not gain access to their savings or uncollected remittances.

But, while these considerations provide a basis for providing full protection to depositors and other depositor like creditors when a financial institution is bailed out, they do not justify extending such protection to bondholders.

In some jurisdictions they form a key part of other policy frameworks, such as protecting depositors in financial institutions, revenue collection, favouring certain categories of creditors over others (such as employees), and so on.

Certainly, a key part of the solution is to allow more banks to fail, ensuring that depositors are paid off in full, but not necessarily debt holders. But this route is going to be costly and painful.

In reality, however, there has been a widespread misperception that somehow Europe protects small depositors. Yet a common deposit insurance system had, at least so far, not even been under discussion, because the issue was not perceived as a live problem.

In the single financial market, banks are allowed to take deposits anywhere, without local approval, if they are authorized to do so in one European country. Yet when the Icelandic banks failed, the British and Dutch authorities had to bail out local depositors.

Bank interest rates on savings are lower than the inflation rate and many multiples lower than the rates promised by the informal sector. Default rates in the informal sector are high, and lenders may disappear with depositors money, as happened in Wenzhou.

First, normal bankruptcy rules don t apply to repos. Second, much repo financing flows into large risk taking financial firms like MF Global, Lehman, and Bear Stearns through money market funds, which must invest very short term, because their depositors want immediate liquidity.

PRINCETON The task was never going to be an easy one impose losses worth about 5.8 billion ( 7.5 billion) on lenders to the Cypriot government and depositors with the country s banks. And now that effort has led Europe to its latest impasse.

The High Representative issued decisions placing two banks under the authority of a provisional administrator charged with overseeing their operations, analysing their transactions for evidence of fraud or other criminal activities and, where possible, recovering assets owed to the banks and their small depositors.

I favored the approach of dollarization , or replacing the Peso by the US dollar and thereby ending the fear of a future change of the exchange rate. Instead, the government closed down the banking system, so that depositors could no longer convert their pesos into dollars!

Germans do not see why they should be vulnerable because of poor quality mortgage lending in American inner cities. Depositors with the British bank Northern Rock blame American developments for the credit turbulence that made it impossible for the bank to continue to fund its lending.

But what financial repression usually involves is keeping interest rates below their natural market level, to the benefit of borrowers at the expense of savers. The borrowers are often governments, and in many emerging economies the state has funded its extravagances by paying bank depositors derisory rates of interest.

And, though it continues to guide interest rates on deposits, banks can easily evade these regulations by selling depositors off balance sheet wealth management products, on which returns are not capped. Increases in the cost of funds sources increase the costs of the funds uses that is, credit to enterprises.

First, it erodes the effectiveness of standard monetary policy (because if interest rates went much below zero, depositors would withdraw cash from banks and put it in safes). Second, it makes relative wages (of, say, manufacturing versus services employees) more rigid, because wage contracts are generally set in euro terms.

But the tentative agreement between Cyprus and the troika (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank) probably means that the worst has been avoided. Big losses for large depositors in Cypriot banks will now be imposed, and the country s second largest bank will be shuttered.

First, the discussion of a levy on bank deposits, and whether small customers should be exempted, put class conflict front and center. Second, the question of foreign, and especially Russian, depositors along with proximity to Syria has turned the rescue of the Cypriot banking sector into an international relations problem.

Private sector activity is slowing, and it is nearing a standstill in the eurozone s most vulnerable economy (Greece), where a bank run is in full swing. Elsewhere, too, depositors are beginning to transfer their savings to the strongest economy (Germany) and to safe havens beyond (Switzerland and the United States).

The consequences are already visible to avoid a complete meltdown, Cyprus has been forced to introduce capital controls which everyone had thought were illegal and unthinkable within the eurozone. As a result, investors and depositors have learned that the erection of financial barriers within the currency area is indeed a genuine risk.

Some were pushed there by the high cost of containing the damage from banks irresponsible behavior. Facing immediate credit rationing and large output contractions, they could be stabilized only by exceptional official financing from abroad, and, in some extreme cases, by defaulting on past commitments (including to bondholders and, most recently, bank depositors).

So, if the PBOC sets the interest rate on one year deposits at 3 , commercial banks can offer depositors a rate as high as 3.3 . Many analysts viewed this policy, which introduced a small degree of previously non existent competition among commercial banks, as a sign that China would soon liberalize interest rates further.

ROME The Basel Accords meant to protect depositors and the public in general from bad banking practices exacerbated the downward economic spiral triggered by the financial crisis of 2008. Throughout the crisis, as business confidence evaporated, banks were forced to sell assets and cut lending in order to maintain capital requirements stipulated by the Accords.

It provides a common resolution mechanism for all banks in Europe, which forces losses to be absorbed by shareholders, bondholders, and large depositors before any government money is committed. To provide short term financing to a bank during any restructuring, the Commission s plan would create a European Fund, putting all banks on an equal footing.

But governments soon realized that the main issue was solvency. They pledged to implement programs aimed at asset purchases (to clarify the balance sheets of financial institutions), recapitalization (to make sure that, if solvent, they could operate and continue to lend), and guarantees (to reassure depositors and some investors that their funds were safe).

African banks, meanwhile, are rock solid compared to their debt heavy counterparts in the US and Europe. While international bankers went bust by making legions of bad loans, African bankers stuck to earning profits the old fashioned way paying very little to depositors, and earning a big spread by buying guaranteed government debt, which yielded healthy returns.

An immediate step that the authorities should take, as many economists have argued for years, is to allow the saving rate to reflect the cost of investment. That way, ordinary depositors would put their savings back into banks, because the formal financial sector would offer them a way to tap into the benefits offered by China s phenomenal growth.

Doing so would have cost them an estimated 1.3 billion, or roughly 0.01 of their GDP a ridiculously low price to pay for financial stability. It would not have created much moral hazard large depositors would have been taxed, and the Cypriot government would still have suffered the strictures of an IMF eurozone program bitter enough medicine.

Under the bold leadership of Mario Draghi, the ECB has committed to provide as much time as possible for most governments to get their acts together. And it has done so by relying on innovative measures that substitute its elastic balance sheet for those of over extended governments, gun shy private investors, and fleeing bank depositors.

It is tempting to conclude that the Fed s eagerness to tighten monetary policy despite unfavorable historical precedents and ongoing economic uncertainty is driven by commercial banks with excessive influence in official policymaking. After all, commercial banks business model works only when the banks can earn (via passive and relatively safe long term investments) at least 3 a year more than they pay depositors.