Ex-Chancellor Warns of Bank Runs Across Europe ... setting the pace for world wide domino effect

HERE Infowars.com March 19, 2013 Paul Joseph Watson

Former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has warned that the raiding of people’s saving accounts in Cyprus could trigger bank runs across Europe.

Darling said that the unprecedented step of looting banks account of those with 100,000 euros or less could lead to a collapse in confidence because it “blows apart” the notion that such sums are protected.

“They have actually now said to people ‘We will come after your deposits, no matter how small your savings are’ and that seems to me to make it more likely that, if you are a saver in Spain or in Italy, for example, and you have just the sniff of the EU or the IMF coming your way, you will take your money out and you will get a run on the bank,” he told BBC Radio Four’s Today show.

Highlighting the case of Northern Rock, a UK bank that became the first in 150 years to suffer a bank run, leading to its collapse, Darling warned that the precedent set in Cyprus could cause chaos.

“I’m not suggesting that tomorrow morning everybody in Southern Europe is going to take their money out of their banks,” he said. “We saw with Northern Rock, everything can be fine on day, and even though I said the Government was standing behind people’s money, we saw queues grow and grow and grow because people thought they were doing the right thing getting their money out.”

Darling concluded that the way the European Union had handled the issue illustrated how the EU was beginning to “unravel”.

Others such as Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian have also warned that the brazen looting of people’s bank accounts could trigger civil unrest.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also raised the prospect of bank runs, writing, “It’s as if the Europeans are holding up a neon sign .. More HERE

Warning! Beware of Possible World Wide Domino Effect !!

“We had proposed a levy with a rate of zero below €100,000, and a higher one afterwards,” said the official. “The Cypriot president did not want to agree to a levy higher than 10 per cent, and if you do the numbers you get the 6.75 and 9.9 [percent].”

Cypriot officials insisted no levy on smaller depositors was impossible. One senior Cypriot official involved in the talks said that because about 35 percent of all deposits are below the threshold, exempting them would mean a rate so high for the rest that it would no longer be viewed as a tax.

“If this is successful then it will be used in the future,” said the dejected official, predicting Spanish and Italian banks could face similar levies. “If this is not successful then who cares about Cyprus.” … More HERE