By Andrei Skvarsky.
Prominent French economist Charles Wyplosz, at an event hosted by Russia’s biggest lender Sberbank, defended the controversial EU/IMF bailout plan for Cyprus.
It’s banks that are to blame for the crisis, and so it’s fair that those who keep money in them should share the burden of it, Professor Wyplosz told The Russia Forum, a large-scale annual conference in Moscow.
It was unfair that in Greece, Spain and Ireland it was ordinary taxpayers who financed the bailout of banks, Wyplosz said.
Wyplosz, who teaches at the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, a postgraduate university, wasn’t too happy with the bailout tax on deposits of less than 100,000 euros, but said those who had entrusted more than 100,000 to Cypriot banks should have been aware there was trouble looming for the island’s banking sector.
The bailout was lashed out against at the same forum by Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov. Russia had been learning to defend property rights from the EU but here was the EU itself trampling those rights underfoot, he charged.
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