The troika just don’t seem to understand banking, which is rather amazing. This settlement pretty much seals the fate of Cyprus banks, and will certainly cause major problems for other Eurozone countries. If enough people go back to a straight cash system, the Euro is doomed along with its banks.

As Duncan keeps pointing out, a lot of the big depositors are businesses, and they have been severely affected by the ‘bank holiday’. The austerians are doing their best to destroy all of the economies in Europe.

The commodities thing was sarcasm. Commodities are even more obviously gambling than stocks and bonds. The only way to make it more obvious would be to move it from Chicago to New Orleans.

The few people who are willing to invest these days tend to be vulture capitalists, who are more interested it draining every penny out of a company than creating a long term, profitable business.

I would not put money into commodity futures right now. From what I can tell, that’s what everybody else is doing, which is driving commodity futures sky high. The problem is that those futures won’t happen at that price because it simply isn’t going to be feasible, which in turn will cause them to crash in the, uhm, future.

Mattresses are starting to look good right now, but the problem is that coins and dollar bills make for lumpy mattress stuffing, and that of course is all that mattress money is good for, since it is contributing nothing — nada, zero, zilch — to current economic activity. Say, wait, I have an idea for what these people can do with all their mattress money, they can invest it into our startup! 😈 Yeah, if only, heh. Finding angels who don’t want 90% of the company upfront is a decided problem…