Cyprus has been clawed back from the brink of a
likely banking sector default in last-minute negotiations, but a week
of desperate wrangling has outlined the shortcomings of the 17-member
euro currency bloc.
Cyprus lurched from proposing an unacceptable levy on small
depositors, to a solution focused on the root of the problem - the
unsustainable balance sheets of its largest banks - but demanding
huge investor losses that are likely to slow the economy for years.
"It is not yet the end of the story," said Zsolt Darvas of Bruegel
think tank. "The risk of Cyprus exiting the euro has not yet been
diminished completely."
The agreed solution will impose losses that could amount to 50 per
cent of all deposits over 100,000 euros (130,000 dollars) held in the
country's two largest banks, which make up an estimated 80 per cent
of the banking sector.
But the ultimate effect on small savers could be worse than the
initially suggested levy on their deposits, some analysts argued.
The non-linear nature of the losses, hitting some investors hard
and sparing others, could push companies into bankruptcy that might
otherwise have been spared, Darvas said.
"While there are people celebrating that the little guy has not
been (subjected to losses), the overall impact on the average Cypriot
citizen who had deposits of less than 100,000 euros may actually be
worse," added Sony Kapoor of Re-define think tank.
Cyprus showed that "the crisis is far from over, that we still
have very significant problems in the banking systems in a number of
countries ... and that we are still lacking effective mechanisms to
deal with them," said Fabian Zuleeg of the European Policy Centre
think tank.
Much of the drama could have been avoided if the common euro
currency were accompanied by a banking union, EU officials say, with
shared rules and liabilities to break the link between bank debt and
sovereigns.
Initial steps have been taken toward a banking union, with a
eurozone banking supervisor due to take up work next year. But the
added pillars of joint bank resolution and deposit guarantees remain
a long way off.
"It is shocking that, 5 years into what started out as a banking
crisis, the EU has failed even to begin a proper process of putting
in place bank resolution legislation," Kapoor said.
Without a bank resolution mechanism, failing banks become the
subject of late-night emergency talks, as in the case of Cyprus, with
solutions adopted at the 11th hour.
"The political cost of this kind of development is very
significant," Zuleeg said of developments in Cyprus. "The trust
between euro area member states has also gone down."
Cyprus has also shown that without joint deposit guarantees laws
obliging EU members to protect savings below 100,000 euros are of
little help when a state is threatened with insolvency - a point
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeble made last week.
And while the idea of "bailing in" small depositors had since been
shot down, now that it had been mooted it would take longer "to get
the genie back into the bottle," according to analyst Carsten Brzeski
of ING bank.
Darvas was confident that Cyprus, the eurozone and the
international bailout partners had made the best of a difficult
situation.
"Given the circumstances I am convinced that they have chosen the
least disruptive options," he said.
He saw last week's events as an example of "why we need the
banking union very much," as it would have fostered early
intervention in Cypriot lenders and provided a standard procedure for
banking resolution.
But Kapoor was more pessimistic, describing Cyprus as a "wake-up
call" to those who believed such joint eurozone rules and guarantees
were a realistic option.
"The banking union has already become a farce," he said, pointing
to stringent conditions demanded by Germany.
Without a meaningful long-term perspective to rebalance economic
differences in the euro area, including the necessary financial
support to make the process sustainable, Kapoor said, "it's time to
seriously start thinking about walking away."
