Hugo Dixon

Imposing capital controls would be a historic mistake for Cyprus and the euro zone – even worse than the crass idea of taxing uninsured deposits. Non-cash transactions would be limited, while withdrawals from cash machines would be rationed.

This would be equivalent to Argentina’s “corralito”, which lasted a year in 2001/2002. If capital controls are imposed, it will be almost impossible to lift them because people will stampede for the exits once they are removed. But such heavy-handed rationing of limited cash would clobber an economy which is already heading for a slump.

Some people will say that Cyprus has already endured a week of capital controls because of the extended bank holiday since last weekend’s botched bailout. But officially imposed indefinite capital controls – blessed by the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund – would be far worse.

They would also be a terrible precedent. Savers in Italy, Spain, Greece and other vulnerable euro zone countries might worry that they would be next and rush to remove cash from their banking systems. If that led to capital controls being imposed in these much bigger economies, the euro zone might then be staring at the end of its single currency.

The least-bad solution is for the European Central Bank to offer to supply unlimited liquidity to the Cypriot banks and fund a run. Some of the money would never return. But, after a few weeks when the people realised that the cash really wasn’t running out, some deposits would return. For the ECB to do this within its rules, the banks must be properly recapitalised and have sufficient collateral.

Cyprus’ deposit grab sets a bad precedent. Money had to be found to prevent its financial system collapsing. But imposing a 6.75 percent tax on insured deposits – or even the 3 percent being discussed on Monday morning – is a type of legalised bank robbery. Cyprus should instead impose a bigger tax on uninsured deposits and not touch small savers.

Confiscating savers’ money will knock confidence in the banks. Trust in the government will also take a hit, since Nicosia had theoretically guaranteed all deposits up to 100,000 euros. Small savers should be encouraged not penalised. They are the quiet heroes of the financial system, who squirrel away their savings, not those who drag it down by engaging in borrowing binges.

Nicosia has not technically broken its promise to guarantee small deposits. That’s because it is not the banks which are failing to repay savers – something which would have triggered the insurance scheme. Instead, it is the government itself which is grabbing a slice of deposits. The pill is also being sugared by giving savers shares in the banks and some of the hoped-for revenues from a possible natural gas bonanza as compensation. That said, the mechanism is still an effective breach of promise.

When euro zone governments agreed last year to give the European Central Bank the power to supervise its banks, that looked like another victory for its president Mario Draghi. It is more like a poisoned chalice.

The ECB will certainly get a chunk of extra power. But it will also be blamed when banks run into trouble, as they inevitably will. Draghi himself is experiencing this first hand following the scandal at Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), which has had to be rescued by the Italian state. He has been lambasted for failing to supervise the country’s third largest bank properly when he ran the Bank of Italy – although the criticism seems overdone and has often been fuelled by his political opponents back in Rome.

The potential reputational risks for the ECB from banking snarl-ups on its watch are probably even bigger than they are for national central banks. This is because it doesn’t yet have the full set of tools to do the job properly. Moreover, a huge amount is at stake since the ECB is the euro zone’s most credible institution. If its reputation gets tarnished because of perceived supervisory failures, that could rub off on its ability to conduct monetary policy or manage crises effectively.

Can Super Mario save the euro? Mario Draghi said last Thursday that the European Central Bank’s job is to stop sovereign bond yields rising if these increases are caused by fears of a euro break-up. While this represents a sea-change in the ECB president’s thinking, it risks sowing dissension within his ranks. He will struggle to come up with the right tools to achieve his goals.

Draghi seemingly stared into the abyss and had a fright. Spanish 10-year bond yields shot up to 7.6 percent on July 24 while Italian ones rose to 6.6 percent. The high borrowing costs are not simply a reflection of the two countries’ high debts and struggling economies. Investors also fear “convertibility risk” – or the possibility that the euro will break up and they will get repaid in devalued pesetas and liras.

The central banker’s statement that dealing with convertibility risk is part of the ECB’s mandate is therefore highly significant. He rammed home his message, saying: “Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.”

The euro zone crisis is a multi-dimensional game of chicken. There isn’t just a standoff between the zone’s core and its periphery; there is also one between the European Central Bank and the euro zone governments over who should rescue the single currency. In such games somebody usually blinks. But if nobody does, the consequences will be terrible.

The brinkmanship between the governments is over how much help the northerners, led by Germany, should give the southerners. The core is effectively threatening the peripheral countries with bankruptcy if they don’t cut their deficits and reform their economies. The periphery is saying that, if they collapse, so will the entire single currency which has been so beneficial to Germany’s economy. The game is being played out transparently in Greece and covertly in Spain.

But even if the core eventually decides to help the periphery, there is a struggle of whether the aid should come from governments or from the ECB. Politicians would like the central bank to do the heavy lifting to avoid having to confront taxpayers with an explicit bill. But the ECB doesn’t think it is its job to help governments, arguing that such support violates the Maastricht Treaty.

Beware the “F” word. The European Central Bank and, to a lesser extent, the zone’s political leaders have bought the time needed to resolve the euro crisis. But there are signs of fatigue. A renewed sense of danger may be needed to spur politicians to address underlying problems. It would be far better if they got ahead of the curve.

The big time-buying exercise was the ECB’s injection of 1 trillion euros of super-cheap three-year money into the region’s banks. A smaller breathing space was won last week when governments agreed to expand the ceiling on the region’s bailout funds from 500 to 700 billion euros.

These moves have taken the heat out of the crisis – both by easing fears that banks could go bust and by making it easier for troubled governments, especially Italy’s and Spain’s, to fund themselves. Data from the ECB last week shows how much of the easy money has been recycled from banks into government bonds. In February, Italian lenders increased their purchases of euro zone government bonds by a record 23 billion euros. Spanish banks, meanwhile, increased their purchases by 15.7 billion euros following a record 23 billion euro spending spree in January.

Bailout may not be a four-letter word. But many of the rescue operations mounted to save banks and governments in the past few years have been four-letter acronyms. Think of the TARP and TALF programmes that were used to bail out the U.S. banking system after Lehman Brothers went bust. Or the European Central Bank’s LTRO, the longer-term refinancing operation. This has involved lending European banks 1 trillion euros for three years at an extraordinarily low interest rate of 1 percent.

The markets and the banks have jumped for joy in response to all this liquidity being sprayed around. So have Italy and Spain, whose borrowing costs have dropped because their banks have been able to take cheap cash from the ECB and recycle it into their governments’ bonds — making a profit on the round trip. But as has been the case with other four-letter bailouts, the LTRO has come in for criticism — most of it a variation on the theme that the way to treat debt junkies isn’t to give them another heroin injection.

One problem is that European governments could now feel less pressure to reform their labour laws and do the other painful things that are needed to get their economies fit. Another is that banks may delay actions that are required to let them stand on their own two feet: such as rebuilding their capital buffers and raising their own longer-term funds on the markets.

Watch Athens more than Standard & Poor’s. The biggest source of immediate trouble for the euro zone could be the one country the ratings agency didn’t examine in a review that led to the downgrade of France and eight other states. Even if the short-term shoals can be navigated, the rest of the zone won’t find it easy to get by Greece.

The points S&P made when stripping France and Austria of their triple-A ratings and knocking two notches off the ratings of the likes of Italy and Spain were valid. It is true, for example, that policymakers can’t agree what to do to solve the euro crisis and that “fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating.” But these points, as well as the prospect of S&P downgrades, were already in the market.

Meanwhile, what Mario Draghi said last week about “tentative signs of stabilization” is true. The European Central Bank (ECB), over which Draghi presides, is itself partly responsible for that stabilization by virtue of providing 489 billion euros of three-year money to banks just before Christmas. Mario Monti’s promising beginning as Italy’s prime minister is the other main factor. The Super Mario Brothers have got off to a good start.

The euro zone will probably get another short-term fix at its summit this week. Exactly how the fix will work isn’t clear. But both Germany and the European Central Bank have softened their positions so much that some sort of solution is in the works. The ECB will probably cut interest rates and spray more liquidity at the troubled banking system; it may also step up its purchases of government bonds; and some scheme for assembling enough money to bail out Italy and Spain — probably by getting national central banks to lend money to the International Monetary Fund, which could then pass it on to Rome and Madrid – may be unveiled.

All this would be cause for celebration. The problem is the price that Germany and seemingly the ECB are demanding for their help: fiscal discipline, embedded in a treaty. Merkel wants the European Commission in Brussels to have the power to overturn irresponsible national budgets and for the European Court of Justice to fine governments that step out of line.

This idea for a treaty is stirring up all sorts of problems. One is that Britain, which is not part of the euro zone but is a member of the European Union, wants a quid pro quo for signing a revised treaty – probably in the form of returning powers over social and judicial affairs to London or getting some veto over the regulation of financial services, the UK’s largest industry.