With the dust yet to settle on a last-minute bailout for Cyprus agreed on Monday (March 25), the European Parliament is expected to propose a future mandatory levy on savings worth more than €100,000. Gunnar Hokmark, the Swedish centre-right MEP charged with piloting draft legislation on a pan-EU bank resolution regime through parliament, has said that MEPs will push for compulsory bail-ins of large deposits to be enshrined in the new law.

Hokmark told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday (26 March) that "deposits above €100,000 are not protected and shall be treated as part of the capital that can be bailed in." Under existing EU law on deposit guarantee schemes, countries are required to protect the first €100,000 of savings in the event of a banking crisis.

However, even this principle was recently challenged by the initial plan to slap a 6.75 percent levy on deposits worth between €20,000 and €100,000 as part of the Cypriot rescue package. Some of the more hawkish member states, including Germany and the Netherlands, are believed to support measures to see investors and savers take a larger share of the burden to reduce the costs to other taxpayers.

First time: Last Saturday when he refused to rule out that insured deposits below 100,000 euros could be taxed in other euro zone countries. In that instance, he asked some very shaken reporters to ask their deposit-related questions all together to save repetition and missed answering several, garnering a stern reprimand from an FT journo, Peter Spiegel.

Then he shrugged off a question about ruling out deposit levies for the likes of Spain and Italy, saying it hadn't been discussed. Olli Rehn later that night saved the situation to some degree, but the blame game for miscommunication continued the following week. Indeed, Dijsselbloem had to backtrack just days later after a massive backlash from Cypriot Parliament and the international community, to whom protection of small deposit holders in banks is a key tenet of modern functioning economies.

He took full blame for that blunder and one might expect him to be more careful or guarded with his comments going forward. That has hardly proven the case, however. And his remarks on Monday suggesting Cyprus would be a model for future bank resolutions in Europe - despite a carefully honed Eurogroup message that Cyprus was in fact "unique" - sent the euro and risk assets spiralling.

The same can be said of his credibility now that a two-word statement clarifying that Cyprus was not a model or template had to be issued hours later. Same blunder as last week. He blatantly has no understanding of risk markets or how to communicate with them.

On Tuesday, President Obama inked his name to HR933, a continuing resolution spending bill approved in Congress days earlier. Buried 78 pages within the bill exists a provision that grossly protects biotech corporations such as the California-based Monsanto Company from litigation. With the president’s signature, agriculture giants that deal with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetically engineered (GE) seeds are given the go-ahead to continue to plant and sell man-made crops, even as questions remain largely unanswered about the health risks these types of products pose to consumers.

In light of approval from the House and Senate, more than 250,000 people signed a petition asking the president to veto the spending bill over the biotech rider tacked on, an item that has since been widely referred to as the “Monsanto Protection Act.”

“But Obama ignored the petition,” IB Times’ Connor Sheets writes, “instead choosing to sign a bill that effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future.”

James Brumley, a reporter for Investor Place, explains a little more thoroughly just how dangerous the rider is now that biotech companies are allowed to bypass judicial scrutiny. Up until it was signed, he writes, “the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] oversaw and approved (or denied) the testing of genetically modified seeds, while the federal courts retained the authority to halt the testing or sale of these plants if it felt that public health was being jeopardized. With HR933 now a law, however, the court system no longer has the right to step in and protect the consumer.”

Lance, who first promised to investigate the matter during a Tea Party event on March 15, sent a letter five days later noting how there was “growing public concern surrounding the Department’s procurement of ammunition.”

“He is not asking for Napolitano to testify but to give us a congressional briefing because Congress wasn’t aware of it. It deserves an answer,” Lance spokesman Todd Mitchell told the Daily Record.

Throughout Cyprus's financial crisis, German power has been on display. But Germany is pursuing the wrong objectives, showing how it's incapable of wielding its power correctly. Cypriot leaders came up with the idea to make their own small-scale savers liable for the bankruptcy of the banks - with the approval of Germany - because they wanted to hold true to their principles of crime and punishment.

All of Europe, indeed the entire world, took notice. Despite deposit insurance and Chancellor Angela Merkel's own promises, in the end it's the common people who suffer? The plan was withdrawn, and now the burden is falling mostly on wealthy Russians. But the damage is done, confidence undermined. What is the chancellor's word actually worth? Cyprus has shown once again that Europe can't rely on the Germans.

Fortunately the Euro Group has now made the right move. Those with smaller deposits are safe, one bank goes bankrupt and another is downsized. But the theatrics of the past week fit well into the image Europe is projecting right now: Irresponsible bankers gamble away the money of even richer money-launderers, and the politicians help both groups to save themselves as best they can - at the expense of the common people, who have neither the resources nor the influence to bring themselves to safety. And all of that takes place under German domination.

But this means nothing for the present. Just like twice before in our recent history, the Germans are falling deeper and deeper into conflict with their neighbors - regardless of the cost. It's a path that could easily lead to fear of German political hegemony on the Continent. Indeed, Merkel's idea of European integration is simply that Europe should bend to Germany's political will.

That decision, like the onerous bailout package for Cyprus announced early Monday, was sealed in Brussels in secretive emergency sessions in the dead of night in late October 2011. That was when the European Union, then struggling to contain a debt crisis in Greece, effectively planted a time bomb that would blow a big hole in Cyprus’s banking system — and set off a chain reaction of unintended and ever-escalating ugly consequences.

“It was 3 o’clock in the morning,” recalled Kikis Kazamias, Cyprus’s finance minister at the time. “I was not happy. Nobody was happy, but what could we do?” He was in Brussels as European leaders and the International Monetary Fund engineered a 50 percent write-down of Greek government bonds. This meant that those holding the bonds — notably the then-cash-rich banks of the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus — would lose at least half the money they thought they had. Eventual losses came close to 75 percent of the bonds’ face value.

The action had an anodyne name — private-sector involvement, or PSI — and, it seemed at the time, a worthy goal: forcing private investors to share some of the burden of shoring up Greece’s crumbling finances. “We Europeans showed tonight that we reached the right conclusions,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany announced at the time. For Cypriot banks, particularly Laiki Bank, at the center of the current storm, however, these conclusions foretold a disaster: Altogether, they lost more than four billion euros, a huge amount in a country with a gross domestic product of just 18 billion euros. Laiki, also known as Cyprus Popular Bank, alone took a hit of 2.3 billion euros, according to its 2011 annual report.

“We are looking at a very grim future for Cyprus,” said Michael Olympios, chairman of the Cyprus Investor Association, a lobbying group. “Even firm believers in the European project like myself see now that it was a bad idea and that we should have at least stayed out of the euro.”

It's not just gold that governments can confiscate – pension assets can be in the firing line, although usually only in emerging markets and in extreme circumstances. In recent years, private pension schemes have been nationalised in Argentina and Hungary.

Could such a scenario happen today? It seems unlikely. In the Thirties, the dollar was pegged to gold and confiscation was simply quantitative easing by another name, while gold investment today is a global phenomenon, so policing any enforcement could be an onerous task.

The appeal of gold as a safe haven remains intact – we hold gold in some of our portfolios. It still plays an important role, given continuing currency devaluation, near-zero interest rates in developed economies and inflation risks. What's more, investors benefit from governments finding it easier to tax income on bonds and equities, rather than gold.

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem is the president of the Eurogroup - an organization of eurozone finance ministers that was instrumental in putting together the Cyprus "deal" - and he has said publicly that what has just happened in Cyprus will serve as a blueprint for future bank bailouts.

What that means is that when the chips are down, they are going to come after YOUR money. So why should anyone put a large amount of money in the bank at this point? Perhaps you can make one or two percent on your money if you shop around for a really good deal, but there is also a chance that 40 percent (or more) of your money will be confiscated if the bank fails. And considering the fact that there are vast numbers of banks all over the United States and Europe that are teetering on the verge of insolvency, why would anyone want to take such a risk?

What the global elite have done is that they have messed around with the fundamental trust that people have in the banking system. In order for any financial system to work, people must have faith in the safety and security of that financial system. People put their money in the bank because they think that it will be safe there. If you take away that feeling of safety, you jeopardize the entire system.