MacroScope

They’ve only been looking for it for a day but Cyprus’s Plan B has already taken on mythical status. A myth it might remain.

Ideas being floated include nationalizing the pension fund (back of the envelope calculations suggest that will raise less than a billion euros) and issuing bonds underpinned by future natural gas revenues (but no one is really sure how much they are worth). So to avoid default it still looks like the Cypriots may have to return to the bank levy they rejected so decisively in parliament on Tuesday, to raise the 5.8 billion euros the euro zone is demanding in return for a bailout.

Finance minister Sarris is still in Moscow hoping for some change out of the Russians and is out this morning saying discussions are ongoing about banks and natural gas.

An existing 2.5 billion euros loan may be extended and on better terms – though there is some doubt even about that. But anything further looks much tougher to secure. Moscow will clearly adopt a “what’s in it for us” attitude and unless it gets its hands on untapped offshore gas reserves for a knock-down price it’s hard to see much money changing hands. The idea floating around yesterday that an essentially failed Cypriot bank could be bought for a chunk of cash seems somewhat fanciful.

Sarris said any help would have to make “economic sense” for Russia. If Moscow merely offered more loans, the euro zone and IMF would presumably say that takes Nicosia’s debts to unsustainable levels so it’s not clear that would work either. After likening the EU to a “bull in a china shop”, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev mused this morning that Moscow might review the share of euros it holds in its reserves, saying what was done to Cyprus could happen to Spain or Italy. Medvedev meets a European Commission delegation headed by Jose Manuel Barroso later today. This increasingly feels like a Russian/EU powerplay with Cyprus as the pawn.

The slow motion Cypriot car crash of the past five days reached impact point last night when not a single lawmaker voted for the bailout with bank levy attached – the first time a euro zone legislature has simply said no.

So what next? The finance minister is in Russia, ostensibly to seek an extension on an existing 2.5 billion euros loan on better terms, but could there be more on offer besides? The Eurogroup made clear last night that the 10 billion euros bailout was still on the table but that Nicosia had to come up with 5.8 billion euros of its own – the sum that a levy on bank depositors was supposed to raise. Could Moscow fill that gap, maybe in return for a slice of the island’s untapped offshore gas reserves? It looks unlikely but not impossible and there are powerful geopolitics at play. That there will be no more money from the euro zone looks like a given and there seems to be a resolve that it would be better to let Cyprus default then buckle at the last moment.

Finance minister Sarris has just said he hopes for a deal on the existing Russian loan today. In Nicosia, the president is meeting party leaders.

Cypriot lawmakers are supposed to vote today on a bailout that hits at least some of its bank depositors but the president’s spokesman has said any such legislation is unlikely to pass. This could be brinkmanship but it doesn’t sound like it.

Last night, euro zone finance ministers urged Nicosia to spare depositors with less than 100,000 euros in the bank and hit the richer harder, in order to raise 5.8 billion euros to free up a 10 billion euros bailout. Without it, Cyprus will surely go bankrupt but that is a deal that President Anastasiades baulked at in Brussels over the weekend. The government faces a stark choice: hit those who vote for it and rip up the deposit insurance they thought they had, or clobber the richer (many of them Russians), thus threatening the meltdown of its banking model.

Despite their belated support for the little guy, the euro zone will accept pretty much anything that raises the requisite cash. Germany and others insist the days of bailouts funded solely by taxpayers are over and the Bundestag probably wouldn’t sanction any other sort of deal.

What a weekend. The euro zone crossed a dangerous Rubicon by whacking Cypriot bank depositors as part of a bailout – a dramatic departure from previous aid programmes. The finance ministers insist it is a one-off (as they did for Greece) but if investors and bank customers fear a precedent has been set, there could yet be a serious backwash for the euro zone. And all this for six billion euros? It seems perplexing to say the least although our trawl of the streets of the euro zone periphery has detected little alarm so far.

Markets are voting with their feet. The euro has dropped well over one percent, European stock futures are pointing to losses of two to three percent and the safe haven Bund future has leapt a full point at the open. Italian bond futures have done the reverse, suggesting that in the bond market at least, there is more than a little concern about contagion from Cyprus. “The crisis is back,” one bond trader told us. “Precedent” is the word on everybody’s lips. I’ve used it before but Bank of England Governor Mervyn King produced the definitive line on bank runs – it’s never logical to start one but it sure could be logical to join one.

To muddy the waters further, the Cypriots are trying to renegotiate the deal to ease the 6.5 percent burden on smaller depositors and raise it on the richer (from 9.9 percent). This suggests that the president fears that today’s parliamentary vote may be lost without changes. If it is lost – no party has a majority and three of them said yesterday they wouldn’t support the programme – we’re in for a real rollercoaster as everyone scrambles to avoid a default, with all the reputational damage that will do to the euro zone. At that point, we could probably kiss goodbye to the five months of calm imposed by the European Central Bank and its “do whatever it takes” pledge.