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26 March 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

Eurogroup demonstrates how not to calm fears about Cyprus

Jeroen Dijsselbloem nearly ruined everything.

By Alex Hern

Good news! Jeroen Dijsselbloem, chair of the group of eurozone finance ministers, nearly accidentally killed the euro yesterday.

In what Reuters blogger Felix Salmon described as a “formal, on-the-record joint interview” with Reuters and the FT, Dijsselbloem managed to suggest that the Cypriot bail-in was, in the words of Reuters’ Luke Baker, “a new template for resolving eurozone banking problems”.

Dijsselbloem said:

What we’ve done last night is what I call pushing back the risks… If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be ‘Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?’. If the bank can’t do it, then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we’ll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders.

The tenor of Dijsselbloem’s comments certainly suggests he meant them to be generally applied. And, on paper, it’s a good ranking of priorities: first you get the bank, which caused the problem, to claw back as much as it can, then you talk to the shareholders and bondholders, who have knowingly taken a risk on the bank’s solvency, and then, you talk to depositors. Because depositors are, after all, just people who have loaned money to the bank in a different form; and if they’re uninsured, they’ve always known there was a risk of losing a lot if they bank went under.

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Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of thing that you aren’t supposed to say. Because the obvious outcome of explicitly stating that uninsured depositors are considered legitimate sources of funds for the recapitalization of their banks is that uninsured depositors start taking their money out of their banks, particularly in the other eurozone nations where the banks aren’t yet out of trouble.

Bank runs are, generally, considered bad news. So it’s somewhat unsurprising that shortly after Dijsselbloem’s interview hit the press, he released a terse statement walking it back. You could smell the burning rubber from the speed of the u-turn; it reads, in full:

Cyprus is a specific case with exceptional challenges which required the bail-in measures we have agreed upon yesterday.

Macro-economic adjustment programmes are tailor-made to the situation of the country concerned and no models or templates are used.

It’s hard to know quite what Dijsselbloem was thinking – although Paweł Morski presents an entertaining scenario of his own. But it becomes a bit clearer when you look at his background.

Dijsselbloem is the Netherlands’ finance minister, a position he has only been in since 2012. His extraordinary position of power in the eurogroup comes from the standard rotating presidency, rather than any particular competency, and, although his electoral career goes back to 2000, his only other policy jobs have been the leader of a parliamentary inquiry on education reform in 2007 and a post at the agriculture ministry from 1996 to 2000.

The eurozone seems to alternate between the under-elected and the under-qualified, and it’s not getting any better.

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