They're setting up a legal tussle, it won't go as far as the SCOTUS. If they really wanted to outlaw abortions, they would just follow the Oklahoma model - they imposed more and more stringent restrictions on clinics and practitioners until following them all was impossible, and they all closed down.
People can rationalize anything. But cheating on a test is not the same as knowing the material.
What they said is no different to when I told my friend this isn't rain, it's sky humidity, save perhaps they were not intentionally being tongue in cheek.
The new frames are superior for clarity, but brown artifacts are vastly superior to silver ones. They should have made the silver/grey artifact frames unique to Mirrodin then ditched them afterwards. Looks too 'tech-ey' for my tastes in every other block.
The DPRK has the tech to launch a satellite into orbit. ICBMs are still beyond them, and China has become increasingly pissed as the US is stationing more and more heavy guns in Asia and the traditionalists who backed the DPRK in the party are retiring.
It's more posturing, and not as bad as the Cheonan incident (remember when they sank that SK frigate?). If the DPRK launch a nuke at US soil (Alaska is the only place they could plausibly hit) there are enough conventional weapons to incinerate anything north of the DMZ worth a damn. You don't need to drop a nuke, and you wouldn't want to with allies and a cagey foreign power in close proximity to your target zone.
Interesting. So does it matter also, that... say, possessing a dollar means you can pay a citizen of the United States and acquire whatever he is producing on the dollar? Is that what you mean by the 'ginormous economy' mattering? Not this is exchange would literally happen but does that contribute? Because I'd like to determine what makes different currencies different.
The value of currency is determined by currency markets - this is how China keeps the yuan pegged at .8 of the dollar, they trigger inflation by releasing large quantities of yuan. The high value of the dollar is because the US has a constant rate of inflation, pays its bills, and has a colossal GDP. Its government and economy are very stable and investor friendly. The yuan probably won't gain huge influence globally because it's perpetually pegged at 80% of the dollar and China has a habit of burning foreign investors.
And would someone expand, please, on the change that occurred where a currency not tied to gold as a finitely available stuff, allowed exchanges to occur not limited by being backed by that finite store of gold? Thanks.
When we stopped using gold, silver, and copper coins for every transaction and started using paper money and credit, you didn't have to back every transaction with gold - or rather, you backed every transaction with a fraction of the amount of gold needed, as your partner would pay you back (fractional reserve banking, which is fine as long as that fractional reserve is about 30% or so rather than 2%). The problem with the gold standard is that everything in a country at any given time that's on the gold standard, can only be worth as much in absolute terms as the amount of gold owned by that nation - generally kept by its federal reserve bank. If you redeem your currency for gold the amount of value that currency can represent goes down, hence financial panics on the gold standard invariably resulted in depressions rather than recessions as huge quantities of money were eliminated in bank runs, wiping out savers and investors.
During a panic, people would switch from the soft currency (loans, bills) to hard currency (specie), and when a bank ran out of specie it would be forced to default, causing a cascade of failure as loans became bad. Without deposit insurance, everyone was wiped out, causing progressively larger system shocks, as the paper money was only representation for the metallic currency.
The long and the short of it is that after World War II, the only nation that wasn't financially devastated was the USA. The Americans were able to dictate terms to its own allies and established financial hegemony over the western world (ie., every industrialized nation except the USSR). They did this by 'allowing' other nations to use US dollars in lieu of gold, essentially equivocating dollars with gold. This made the position of the dollar incredibly important, and it was backed by the worlds single largest economy, a title previously held by Britain.
These banks aren't acting under free market principles when investments do poorly - they go begging to governments for money since they were undercapitalized or had overly narrow investment portfolios. Once bailed out, they get off scot free from any sort of punishment, while the economy crashes anyway and taxpayers are stuck with the bill.
If these banks were capitalized appropriately, then why are they begging for 17 billion Euros? Plenty of banks actually survived the financial crisis in a reasonably healthy fashion, like JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. Financial risk has been spread across the Euro zone for 5 years now and these guys still didn't build up sufficient capital and de-leverage sufficiently after all the time and risk associated with the Greek debacle?
The ends justify the means.* Similarly, the means do not justify the end.** There is no absolute answer as this is no absolute example - context must be taken for each event where we perform coercion.
*The ends justify the means if they are successful, noble enough, and the means not unnecessarily wicked, creating more problems than they solve. The end, then, must be taken in context as the greater fallout of the event, rather than any one specific goal.
**Your upstanding moral nature is a hindrance if it prevents achievement of practical goals. Morality demands some degree of utilitarianism as good is an end, not a means. So morality declares that dangerous individuals need to be restrained for the safety of society - do we sully good by allowing this theft of liberties to be included within it, or permit ourselves to commit a lesser evil for a greater purpose? We are left in blindness if only the means matter - doing good but committing evil.
Why is uninsured money the responsibility of the people of Cyprus? It isn't. If they tap the accounts for money, it's proof that money isn't safe in Cyprus anyway, which will trigger a bank run. These institutions are doomed without a no strings bailout, which the EU doesn't want to provide, and Cyprus can't give on its own without soaking everyone for about 30% of their holdings. Either way the end result is the same.
The no strings bailout is preferable, but impossible under current terms. Which is why they're going hat in hand to Russia, China, and anywhere that will listen.
The bail in is requiring buy in of the public money without remuneration to protect uninsured money and institutions that will probably fail even if it's enacted, since nobody is going to keep their money in a place that will chop off a few % points of it when it gets into trouble.
What is the upside here? What possible benefit could be derived from this plan? If the money isn't insured, the investors knew this, assumed the risk, and now are whining that they're exposed to this risk? Cry me a river. You can't always get what you want. There's economic collapse and a nigh certain bank run no matter what happens. Why throw good money after bad? Let the banks default, enter bankruptcy proceedings, and sell off their assets to other banks.
Well, what do you propose Cyprus does about it? The banks were poorly capitalized and have liabilities way in excess of what Cyprus can possibly pay. If they maintain their position as a corporate friendly hub then the collapse of any or all of the major banks there isn't a long term problem. They're going to face economic collapse no matter what happens. These banks are going to run and collapse no matter what - any sort of bailout would require multiple injections of cash that aren't forthcoming.
What happened in Iceland is hardly pain free but it's the best model for Cyprus now if the EU or Russia won't pony up the dough. The contagion is somebody else's problem - if banks aren't properly capitalized after *5 years* of this, they deserve to fail. Propping them up only supports structural weaknesses and keeps incompetent people lording over that sector. Enough is enough of bailouts. These people are relying on the EU keeping them afloat even though they made no effort to do so on their own.
Banks in Delaware defaulting is going to suck for Delaware, but it's not really a big deal for the rest of the US because the banks based there are tiny. The financial crisis in the US was caused by accounting gimmicks and an asset bubble. Delaware has thousands of multinationals incorporated there, which is something different. I'm not aware of anything terribly relevant about their banks.
The majority of the banking done in Cyprus belongs to the Cypriots, much of their foreign clientele comes from the East, not the West. Banks defaulting in Cyprus isn't going to bring down the Euro zone, those banks liabilities are 17 billion Euros and half of their depositors are from Cyprus. A partial default will suck, but Cyprus doesn't have the money to do anything more than back the insured deposits, and maybe not even that much. That's why they're so desperate for cash that Anastasiades was looking to levy a tax on deposits, since the Euro zone was only willing to front 10 billion Euros. If they aren't going to institute that levy they can't rustle up the cash by printing a bundle of Euros, which means they do a partial default on their banks or agree to absorb an impossible amount of debt which will bankrupt them. So practically they're left with 3 options - full bailout with foreign sponsorship + oodles of domestic money, maybe partial bailout, or bank default and then they cover insured deposits. If A and B are off the table, it's better to let the banks absorb the blow 100% than to have the country eat it and suffer financial collapse along with an unsustainable debt load, similar to what Iceland did. They'll at least be able to enter recovery with tidy balance sheets. Otherwise they're looking at the Irish model, where Ireland suffered economic collapse anyway and has nothing to show for its bank bailouts except a few banks and 10% of its population emigrating.
Keynesian economic recommends you bail out failing banks to stave off total economic collapse. Bailing out a bank is not an end unto itself, and the ability to follow this advice is impossible for every country, particularly those with outsize banking sectors. Absorbing so much liability you destroy yourself is an own goal worse than a bank run, as long as depositors aren't completely wiped out you've achieved a (partial) victory, as there's a spectrum of things you can do - such as pushing the banks into bankruptcy proceedings and spinning off their divisions, as what happened to Lehman brothers. This allows the business to continue, albeit at a reduced rate. If Cyprus remains a good place for business, then they can recover, as a panic is pretty much on the table no matter what option they choose. For Cyprus, the day is lost. They need to plan for the future.
If we didn't have coinage (ancient Egypt), we would rely on a barter economy, which is difficult to participate in. Interestingly enough, gold was not highly valued in the time of the Pharaohs. The fascination with the metal originated later, among the Greeks.
Among the first coins were those minted by Croesus of Lydia, who was conquered by Cyrus the Great IIRC. The Spartans had money in the form of iron bars of varying length, iron being in and of itself a thing of great value. Some Pacific islanders whose names elude me used large circular beads as money, with the largest being boulders with holes bored into them.
The entire value of money - and most dollars don't exist as paper currency, they exist as blips in binary (that's what your cash in the bank is [and before the digital age they were just numbers in a ledger]) - is that money is a universal commodity. It is a good that is accepted anywhere. That is why money is useful. Technically in any transaction you are both buying and selling - you are offering to sell your money for the others commodity, and vice versa. Currency allows more complex forms of transaction to occur, and for transactions to occur without the vagaries of the barter system. Chickens, after a period of time, have a habit of dying or going bad. Paying your rent in hay is all well and good, but requires the hay recipient to go out and either use said hay themselves or find someone who wants it. Money eliminates this onerous step (landlord doesn't need hay, so trade hay for $$$ and $$$ for rent).
Money exists because of faith in it. The entire financial market is set up similarly to the market for magic cards, where value is based upon usability, availability, and reliability. These values are determined by market forces, not dissimilar to how the auction houses in Diablo 3 and World of WarCraft work if you play those. The USDollar has a high value because people know that the US government has a sustainable debt load, is responsible, and has a ginormous economy. It also served as the worlds reserve currency after Bretton Woods (that's an important conference about the economy post WW2, but outside the reach of this discussion). Dollars, like every other currency, are traded in global money markets like shares of stock and any other commodity (money = commodity). The dollar is held in high regard because it's the best currency for it because of the reserve status, ubiquity, colossal economy, and stable politics of the US.
True fiat currency first emerged in China, when one of the Mongol Emperors declared that paper money was exchangeable at certain rates, but this was reverted after his death. Practically it emerged first as pegged to the value of specie (gold and silver in the bank, later only gold) to overcome the limitations of the metallic standard (heavy, easy to disfigure and clip, hard to tell true value without expensive instruments). This allowed large transactions to occur without lugging 30 kilos of metal that said "Rob Me" around. During the twentieth century the first steps away from the metallic currency were taken by FDR during the depression, who declared that dollars were no longer exchangeable for gold. This probably would have caused a panic in better times, but nobody had any money left anyway. Later, Richard Nixon declared the value of the dollar would no longer be linked to gold, thus creating the first (sustained) floating currency.
Whether or not one floating currencies existed beforehand practically is worthy of discussion (even if the answer is a qualified no), as most of the money in the financial system is in the forms of loans by banks, who loan out assets on the promise of them being repaid. So a bank will loan people the same money on credit (theirs and the banks) multiple times - this is important, it's why banks work, large economies and sophisticated finances work, and why banks making bad decisions sucks so very badly for everyone. Various currency crises occurred in the pre world war 1 era, but a fraternity among central bankers caused specie to be swapped between central banks of various nations to support each other in order to ward them off (seriously, they gave each other the gold they used to back their own currencies). During this time currencies jostled with each other, but the corrections needed to be gold standard only were so painful they were warded off by this transference of specie, as a currency based on gold can only back a certain amount of money in its system at any given time, which can ultimately be less than the value needed to maintain usable cash flows in the economy - ie., the price of gold needs to skyrocket or the value of money needs to disintegrate to accommodate economic growth on a gold standard.
Cyprus doesn't have the money - the liability of 17 billion Euros is in a country with a GDP of 23 billion. They will end up with a partial bailout at best, not guaranteeing all banks or all deposits, without taking it from their citizens. If they do take it from a levy on accounts, those people deserve to be compensated with interest at the going rate for that 'loan'.
The risk of contagion in Cyprus is minimal in a place with less than 1% of the gross product of the Eurozone, and the concern of shareholders is completely irrelevant to any discussion of a bailout. If people want to bail out banks to prevent worse financial disaster, those banks and their investors need to eat the losses for their own irresponsible behavior. A good start would be to privatize any institution that needs a bail out without compensation for its shareholders, claw back 3 years worth of pre tax compensation from the board and executives, spin off its divisions, and disbar anyone at the director level or higher from working in financial services for the rest of their lives. There needs to be some kind of severe penalty for this. Not "we dun goofed, hur hur, give us 17 billion Euros or ur economy crashes oops".
There's alot of structural benefits because the economies are so intertwined.
Think about it, what makes you put your money into banks? One of the things you've probably taken for granted is you have full confidence that you will get your money out once you've put it in.
But imagine your ability to withdraw money had the reliability of buying a mox sapphire from a guy with 0 feedback on ebay.
Our financial system depends very heavily on public confidence in the financial system. It's this confidence that allows people to deposit money in banks, which in turn puts the money back into the economy to invest in other things---roads, libraries, businesses. Even your house mortage is funded with money from banks---money that was only put into the banks because people had confidence in being able to pull that money out.
Spending on regular goods also tends to be related to consumer confidence. Are you going to buy that couch, or are you going to make do with what you have already. If you knew you weren't going to have a job in a few months, I'll bet you'll save.
On the other hand, if your job is secure, you'll be more willing to freely spend money on goods.
The bottom line is that confidence makes the world go round. We're so used to that confidence, we take it for granted. But in my father's time (he was a refugee of war), that was not the case. In his time, if you held paper money, you could not be assured it would retain its value over the next few months. If you put it in the bank, you could not be sure the government wouldn't confiscate it.
Governments bail out banks because they pretty much have to in this day and age.
What does Greece have to do with Cyprus? Very little until you learn that Cyprus held onto greek bonds. What does Cyprus have to do with anything else.....that's just it, we won't really know what the failure of the Cyprus banks will do to other institutions in different parts of the world that may have invested in Cyprus.
What does the mortgage market have to with money market bills? Very little until you realize that Lehman Bros invested heavily in them, went bankrupt, which caused a panic in Reserve Primary fund (who owned commercial paper of Lehman bros), causing massive number of investors to flee the money markets, causing the money markets to "break the buck"
In order to stop the bleeding right where it starts, governments have to bail out right then and there. Failure to do so can easily spark a set of chain reactions that may well go beyond any government's power to remedy once the thing is set in full bloom.
You can either bolt the priest of titania on the turn she comes out, or you can wait till legacy elves has another turn and see what happens.
The Cypriot bailout plan was a 6.25% levy on deposits below 100k Euros and an over 10% levy on anything larger. Their plan, in and of itself, destroyed confidence in the banking system. So long as the insured deposits - the safe, guaranteed deposits - remain honored, confidence is fine. Uninsured deposits are not the concern of the people of Cyprus or the EU.
If the bailout of the banks of Cyprus is the concern of other than Cyprus, than those respective governments can pony up the dough. We've been going through 'contagion' and 'doubt' for 3 years now - they've reliably bailed out banks but we're still lurching from one disaster to another. After Cyprus, it's Italy, Spain, or Portugal. Maybe France! If the banks aren't appropriately capitalized, it's time to start allowing poorly managed institutions to disintegrate and flush their bad assets and unsustainable debt load. As long as deposits are insured the impact of banking collapse is minimal. The impact of Lehman Brothers collapsing was minimal - the ****storm that followed was a result of complex financial products being hocked by institutions that were dramatically over leveraged, causing even minimal market fluctuations to destroy them. As capital flows dried up since every bank seemed to be doing it, what would have ordinarily been a series of acquisitions was instead a series of bankruptcies.
I don't object to the bailout in principal. If somebody wants to do it, bully for them. I don't think that the Cypriots should have to pay for it. Cyprus isn't going to come up with 7 billion Euros, and your average Cypriot shouldn't have to pay to bail out undercapitalized institutions loaded with bad assets, principally among them foreign money.
The Cypriot parliament overwhelmingly rejected the bailout measure for its banks, and rightly so.
I'm curious why, exactly, we need to keep bailing out these institutions. What structural benefit do we derive from maintaining them? Cyprus is a tiny nation and it needs to pony up a total of 16 billion to cover domestic corporate liabilities? These are corporate, not national liabilities? Are the banks going to be broken up for this? Are they going to pay Cyprus and the EU back? Why do we care about a bunch of uninsured investors? Surely they have deposit insurance for their own citizens? Surely their depositors knew and assumed the risks of uninsured deposits.
As we lurch from one crisis to another in the EU for the past 3 years now, it's getting tiresome to continuously stumble across entities who have not braced themselves for the storm they are in. So long as deposit insurance for accounts is honored the rest isn't any concern of the federals. This isn't Cyprus going bankrupt, it's banks in Cyprus taking the hit. So take the hit, let them absorb the losses and flush the unsustainable debt load, and move on.
What, I love me my hydra's during the campaign. Gave them the increased range upgrade and put them behind a wall of Roaches(with the spawn units they kill upgrade), or Ultralisks with the poison upgrade, they would shred air units like butter and pretty much never died with that back-up.
Also note ultralisks backed with Banelings with the healing explosions are hillarious.
Try it on brutal, which is closer akin to how a real game plays out. Trick is, Hydras have 5 range basic, while Roaches have 4. That means you can have 1 Roach in front of every Hydra for Roach/Hydra to work. If you really want the Hydras to do damage, you need Sling/Bling/Hydra. Try this vs. Protoss and you will weep as you see what only *one* storm does to your precious Hydras. It reduces them to 2 HP from 80 (1hp regenerated instantly, 1 after 4 seconds). Toss in anything else and your very expensive, very slow, very supply intensive Hydras will start dying left and right. Without creep, Hydras have to stand in AoE damage for agonizing seconds as their health collapses and stalkers peck at them. Try it vs. a Terran and you will learn to fear tanks and Medivac supported bio. Try it vs. the gimp battle hellions in the campaign and you will weep for Hydras that face the bath salt fueled, face eating multiplayer battle hellions. Hydras only work in the campaign because Kerrigan can crushing grip and kinetic blast away their counters, as well as healing from various sources making a weak Hydra more than just a touch of splash away from a red stain on the ground.
On the mission that introduces Hydras on Kaldir, you make them, but honestly it's better just to seize your natural expo quickly, build maybe two groups of 10 Hydras, and create a forest of Spore Crawlers in front of every shuttle gate. 20 spore crawlers are a much better investment than 20 Hydras, and they do more DPS and cost no supply or gas.
Roaches are omgwtfbbqpwn awesome even with 25 less HP once they get the Vile Strain upgrade. Vile Roaches beat freaking *immortals* and kick the crap out of Thors and Colossi.
Their (hydra) upgrades - both Lurker and Impaler - are finger lickin' good. You should only make Hydras for their morphs, use something - anything - else for anti air. Mutalisks and queens are best, really. Or Swarm Hosts with the upgrade.
What they said is no different to when I told my friend this isn't rain, it's sky humidity, save perhaps they were not intentionally being tongue in cheek.
It's more posturing, and not as bad as the Cheonan incident (remember when they sank that SK frigate?). If the DPRK launch a nuke at US soil (Alaska is the only place they could plausibly hit) there are enough conventional weapons to incinerate anything north of the DMZ worth a damn. You don't need to drop a nuke, and you wouldn't want to with allies and a cagey foreign power in close proximity to your target zone.
The value of currency is determined by currency markets - this is how China keeps the yuan pegged at .8 of the dollar, they trigger inflation by releasing large quantities of yuan. The high value of the dollar is because the US has a constant rate of inflation, pays its bills, and has a colossal GDP. Its government and economy are very stable and investor friendly. The yuan probably won't gain huge influence globally because it's perpetually pegged at 80% of the dollar and China has a habit of burning foreign investors.
When we stopped using gold, silver, and copper coins for every transaction and started using paper money and credit, you didn't have to back every transaction with gold - or rather, you backed every transaction with a fraction of the amount of gold needed, as your partner would pay you back (fractional reserve banking, which is fine as long as that fractional reserve is about 30% or so rather than 2%). The problem with the gold standard is that everything in a country at any given time that's on the gold standard, can only be worth as much in absolute terms as the amount of gold owned by that nation - generally kept by its federal reserve bank. If you redeem your currency for gold the amount of value that currency can represent goes down, hence financial panics on the gold standard invariably resulted in depressions rather than recessions as huge quantities of money were eliminated in bank runs, wiping out savers and investors.
During a panic, people would switch from the soft currency (loans, bills) to hard currency (specie), and when a bank ran out of specie it would be forced to default, causing a cascade of failure as loans became bad. Without deposit insurance, everyone was wiped out, causing progressively larger system shocks, as the paper money was only representation for the metallic currency.
@ Soriel: the position of the dollar as the worlds reserve currency is because of the Bretton Woods conference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
The long and the short of it is that after World War II, the only nation that wasn't financially devastated was the USA. The Americans were able to dictate terms to its own allies and established financial hegemony over the western world (ie., every industrialized nation except the USSR). They did this by 'allowing' other nations to use US dollars in lieu of gold, essentially equivocating dollars with gold. This made the position of the dollar incredibly important, and it was backed by the worlds single largest economy, a title previously held by Britain.
If these banks were capitalized appropriately, then why are they begging for 17 billion Euros? Plenty of banks actually survived the financial crisis in a reasonably healthy fashion, like JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. Financial risk has been spread across the Euro zone for 5 years now and these guys still didn't build up sufficient capital and de-leverage sufficiently after all the time and risk associated with the Greek debacle?
*The ends justify the means if they are successful, noble enough, and the means not unnecessarily wicked, creating more problems than they solve. The end, then, must be taken in context as the greater fallout of the event, rather than any one specific goal.
**Your upstanding moral nature is a hindrance if it prevents achievement of practical goals. Morality demands some degree of utilitarianism as good is an end, not a means. So morality declares that dangerous individuals need to be restrained for the safety of society - do we sully good by allowing this theft of liberties to be included within it, or permit ourselves to commit a lesser evil for a greater purpose? We are left in blindness if only the means matter - doing good but committing evil.
The no strings bailout is preferable, but impossible under current terms. Which is why they're going hat in hand to Russia, China, and anywhere that will listen.
The bail in is requiring buy in of the public money without remuneration to protect uninsured money and institutions that will probably fail even if it's enacted, since nobody is going to keep their money in a place that will chop off a few % points of it when it gets into trouble.
What is the upside here? What possible benefit could be derived from this plan? If the money isn't insured, the investors knew this, assumed the risk, and now are whining that they're exposed to this risk? Cry me a river. You can't always get what you want. There's economic collapse and a nigh certain bank run no matter what happens. Why throw good money after bad? Let the banks default, enter bankruptcy proceedings, and sell off their assets to other banks.
What happened in Iceland is hardly pain free but it's the best model for Cyprus now if the EU or Russia won't pony up the dough. The contagion is somebody else's problem - if banks aren't properly capitalized after *5 years* of this, they deserve to fail. Propping them up only supports structural weaknesses and keeps incompetent people lording over that sector. Enough is enough of bailouts. These people are relying on the EU keeping them afloat even though they made no effort to do so on their own.
The majority of the banking done in Cyprus belongs to the Cypriots, much of their foreign clientele comes from the East, not the West. Banks defaulting in Cyprus isn't going to bring down the Euro zone, those banks liabilities are 17 billion Euros and half of their depositors are from Cyprus. A partial default will suck, but Cyprus doesn't have the money to do anything more than back the insured deposits, and maybe not even that much. That's why they're so desperate for cash that Anastasiades was looking to levy a tax on deposits, since the Euro zone was only willing to front 10 billion Euros. If they aren't going to institute that levy they can't rustle up the cash by printing a bundle of Euros, which means they do a partial default on their banks or agree to absorb an impossible amount of debt which will bankrupt them. So practically they're left with 3 options - full bailout with foreign sponsorship + oodles of domestic money, maybe partial bailout, or bank default and then they cover insured deposits. If A and B are off the table, it's better to let the banks absorb the blow 100% than to have the country eat it and suffer financial collapse along with an unsustainable debt load, similar to what Iceland did. They'll at least be able to enter recovery with tidy balance sheets. Otherwise they're looking at the Irish model, where Ireland suffered economic collapse anyway and has nothing to show for its bank bailouts except a few banks and 10% of its population emigrating.
Keynesian economic recommends you bail out failing banks to stave off total economic collapse. Bailing out a bank is not an end unto itself, and the ability to follow this advice is impossible for every country, particularly those with outsize banking sectors. Absorbing so much liability you destroy yourself is an own goal worse than a bank run, as long as depositors aren't completely wiped out you've achieved a (partial) victory, as there's a spectrum of things you can do - such as pushing the banks into bankruptcy proceedings and spinning off their divisions, as what happened to Lehman brothers. This allows the business to continue, albeit at a reduced rate. If Cyprus remains a good place for business, then they can recover, as a panic is pretty much on the table no matter what option they choose. For Cyprus, the day is lost. They need to plan for the future.
Among the first coins were those minted by Croesus of Lydia, who was conquered by Cyrus the Great IIRC. The Spartans had money in the form of iron bars of varying length, iron being in and of itself a thing of great value. Some Pacific islanders whose names elude me used large circular beads as money, with the largest being boulders with holes bored into them.
The entire value of money - and most dollars don't exist as paper currency, they exist as blips in binary (that's what your cash in the bank is [and before the digital age they were just numbers in a ledger]) - is that money is a universal commodity. It is a good that is accepted anywhere. That is why money is useful. Technically in any transaction you are both buying and selling - you are offering to sell your money for the others commodity, and vice versa. Currency allows more complex forms of transaction to occur, and for transactions to occur without the vagaries of the barter system. Chickens, after a period of time, have a habit of dying or going bad. Paying your rent in hay is all well and good, but requires the hay recipient to go out and either use said hay themselves or find someone who wants it. Money eliminates this onerous step (landlord doesn't need hay, so trade hay for $$$ and $$$ for rent).
Money exists because of faith in it. The entire financial market is set up similarly to the market for magic cards, where value is based upon usability, availability, and reliability. These values are determined by market forces, not dissimilar to how the auction houses in Diablo 3 and World of WarCraft work if you play those. The USDollar has a high value because people know that the US government has a sustainable debt load, is responsible, and has a ginormous economy. It also served as the worlds reserve currency after Bretton Woods (that's an important conference about the economy post WW2, but outside the reach of this discussion). Dollars, like every other currency, are traded in global money markets like shares of stock and any other commodity (money = commodity). The dollar is held in high regard because it's the best currency for it because of the reserve status, ubiquity, colossal economy, and stable politics of the US.
True fiat currency first emerged in China, when one of the Mongol Emperors declared that paper money was exchangeable at certain rates, but this was reverted after his death. Practically it emerged first as pegged to the value of specie (gold and silver in the bank, later only gold) to overcome the limitations of the metallic standard (heavy, easy to disfigure and clip, hard to tell true value without expensive instruments). This allowed large transactions to occur without lugging 30 kilos of metal that said "Rob Me" around. During the twentieth century the first steps away from the metallic currency were taken by FDR during the depression, who declared that dollars were no longer exchangeable for gold. This probably would have caused a panic in better times, but nobody had any money left anyway. Later, Richard Nixon declared the value of the dollar would no longer be linked to gold, thus creating the first (sustained) floating currency.
Whether or not one floating currencies existed beforehand practically is worthy of discussion (even if the answer is a qualified no), as most of the money in the financial system is in the forms of loans by banks, who loan out assets on the promise of them being repaid. So a bank will loan people the same money on credit (theirs and the banks) multiple times - this is important, it's why banks work, large economies and sophisticated finances work, and why banks making bad decisions sucks so very badly for everyone. Various currency crises occurred in the pre world war 1 era, but a fraternity among central bankers caused specie to be swapped between central banks of various nations to support each other in order to ward them off (seriously, they gave each other the gold they used to back their own currencies). During this time currencies jostled with each other, but the corrections needed to be gold standard only were so painful they were warded off by this transference of specie, as a currency based on gold can only back a certain amount of money in its system at any given time, which can ultimately be less than the value needed to maintain usable cash flows in the economy - ie., the price of gold needs to skyrocket or the value of money needs to disintegrate to accommodate economic growth on a gold standard.
The risk of contagion in Cyprus is minimal in a place with less than 1% of the gross product of the Eurozone, and the concern of shareholders is completely irrelevant to any discussion of a bailout. If people want to bail out banks to prevent worse financial disaster, those banks and their investors need to eat the losses for their own irresponsible behavior. A good start would be to privatize any institution that needs a bail out without compensation for its shareholders, claw back 3 years worth of pre tax compensation from the board and executives, spin off its divisions, and disbar anyone at the director level or higher from working in financial services for the rest of their lives. There needs to be some kind of severe penalty for this. Not "we dun goofed, hur hur, give us 17 billion Euros or ur economy crashes oops".
The Cypriot bailout plan was a 6.25% levy on deposits below 100k Euros and an over 10% levy on anything larger. Their plan, in and of itself, destroyed confidence in the banking system. So long as the insured deposits - the safe, guaranteed deposits - remain honored, confidence is fine. Uninsured deposits are not the concern of the people of Cyprus or the EU.
If the bailout of the banks of Cyprus is the concern of other than Cyprus, than those respective governments can pony up the dough. We've been going through 'contagion' and 'doubt' for 3 years now - they've reliably bailed out banks but we're still lurching from one disaster to another. After Cyprus, it's Italy, Spain, or Portugal. Maybe France! If the banks aren't appropriately capitalized, it's time to start allowing poorly managed institutions to disintegrate and flush their bad assets and unsustainable debt load. As long as deposits are insured the impact of banking collapse is minimal. The impact of Lehman Brothers collapsing was minimal - the ****storm that followed was a result of complex financial products being hocked by institutions that were dramatically over leveraged, causing even minimal market fluctuations to destroy them. As capital flows dried up since every bank seemed to be doing it, what would have ordinarily been a series of acquisitions was instead a series of bankruptcies.
I don't object to the bailout in principal. If somebody wants to do it, bully for them. I don't think that the Cypriots should have to pay for it. Cyprus isn't going to come up with 7 billion Euros, and your average Cypriot shouldn't have to pay to bail out undercapitalized institutions loaded with bad assets, principally among them foreign money.
I'm curious why, exactly, we need to keep bailing out these institutions. What structural benefit do we derive from maintaining them? Cyprus is a tiny nation and it needs to pony up a total of 16 billion to cover domestic corporate liabilities? These are corporate, not national liabilities? Are the banks going to be broken up for this? Are they going to pay Cyprus and the EU back? Why do we care about a bunch of uninsured investors? Surely they have deposit insurance for their own citizens? Surely their depositors knew and assumed the risks of uninsured deposits.
As we lurch from one crisis to another in the EU for the past 3 years now, it's getting tiresome to continuously stumble across entities who have not braced themselves for the storm they are in. So long as deposit insurance for accounts is honored the rest isn't any concern of the federals. This isn't Cyprus going bankrupt, it's banks in Cyprus taking the hit. So take the hit, let them absorb the losses and flush the unsustainable debt load, and move on.
Try it on brutal, which is closer akin to how a real game plays out. Trick is, Hydras have 5 range basic, while Roaches have 4. That means you can have 1 Roach in front of every Hydra for Roach/Hydra to work. If you really want the Hydras to do damage, you need Sling/Bling/Hydra. Try this vs. Protoss and you will weep as you see what only *one* storm does to your precious Hydras. It reduces them to 2 HP from 80 (1hp regenerated instantly, 1 after 4 seconds). Toss in anything else and your very expensive, very slow, very supply intensive Hydras will start dying left and right. Without creep, Hydras have to stand in AoE damage for agonizing seconds as their health collapses and stalkers peck at them. Try it vs. a Terran and you will learn to fear tanks and Medivac supported bio. Try it vs. the gimp battle hellions in the campaign and you will weep for Hydras that face the bath salt fueled, face eating multiplayer battle hellions. Hydras only work in the campaign because Kerrigan can crushing grip and kinetic blast away their counters, as well as healing from various sources making a weak Hydra more than just a touch of splash away from a red stain on the ground.
On the mission that introduces Hydras on Kaldir, you make them, but honestly it's better just to seize your natural expo quickly, build maybe two groups of 10 Hydras, and create a forest of Spore Crawlers in front of every shuttle gate. 20 spore crawlers are a much better investment than 20 Hydras, and they do more DPS and cost no supply or gas.
Roaches are omgwtfbbqpwn awesome even with 25 less HP once they get the Vile Strain upgrade. Vile Roaches beat freaking *immortals* and kick the crap out of Thors and Colossi.
Their (hydra) upgrades - both Lurker and Impaler - are finger lickin' good. You should only make Hydras for their morphs, use something - anything - else for anti air. Mutalisks and queens are best, really. Or Swarm Hosts with the upgrade.