You may suffer from number-table-column boredom (most sane people do) but it should be easy anyway to work out what I’m on about in relation to the above. Although its full title is the Cyprus Deposits And Levy Table, I have highlighted and numbered the three key points to keep it simple. I am grateful to the Greek source who handed it to me. It leaves B-am-B with a lot of explaining to do.

First up at point 1, you an see that the entire Cyprus tax revenue per annum is €5.8 billion. That number ring a bell? Correct – it’s the amount the EC insists must come from Nicosia in return for a €10 billion bailout. To the left of that column you will see that, spookily, it happens to correlate 100% with the 8.5% overall deposits levy demand that the EU FinMins made to Cyprus negotiators a week ago today.

Put simply, this is stealing the money of depositors at the level of an entire year’s tax income.

Now go to circle 2, and there you will see that this represents a whopping 32% of Cypriot GDP. Now go to rectangle 3, and you will see that this represents over three times higher a percentage than the GDPs of other EU PIIGs, four times that of Italy and five times that of Greece.

That’s why I call this ridiculously greedy idea Grand Larceny.

Extrapolating to make the point, the application this level of levy across the EU would deliver a staggering €300+ billion into the ECB’s coffers. Is this what Tim Geithner might have called the beginnings of a bazooka to leverage? Olli Rehn tells us this levy will never be repeated elsewhere.  In 1832, Income Tax was a one-off in the UK at 1p in the Pound. Today the lowest rate for most people is 20%, and the temporary British idea has become permanently standard practice across the world.

Olli Rehn is full of sh*t, and everyone knows it. What The Slog revealed yesterday is that several other major countries are already looking at depositor levies. To these can now be added Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, after legislation was rushed through parliament, the government will from May 31 be able to transfer all money from accounts that have not been used for three years into their own revenues. And in Kiwi-land, The National Government are pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts. Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English’s favoured option for dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors would have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank’s bail out.

There are all kinds of phrases and acronyms being invented as we speak for these ‘ideas’, but what they amount to is looting – pure and simple. And in this regard, we see that there is absolutely nothing to choose between governments and banks: they are seamlessly joined at the hip like two ugly Siamese twins. And of course, they lie with the same goggle-eyed, unblinking sociopathy.

For instance, when it comes to lies, does anyone really think that the Cypriot suggestion for a levy would be the entire tax revenue and a third of the GDP? The idea is laughable: it is a lie.

For nearly a week now I have wracked my brains to work out WTF Berlin in particular is playing at. Now I have decided: for the Merkeschäuble Juggernaut, Cyprus is just another Test Market. I don’t think any of those involved in the inner vicious circle of all this “had no idea” what the repercussions would be: we are talking €10 billion here, when Greece has already cost the EU close to €200 billion. Berlin saw this as a relatively small way to gauge several things: could they get away with citizen-looting in order to pay the bills of their masters? Could they do it without hacking Russia off? Would this put Draghi in his box? What effect might that have on the Troika negotiations in Athens? And based on all that data, is it really worthwhile staying in the euro, or should we GTF out before things become seriously expensive – thus reducing the heat we’re getting from our Bankfurters?

Berlin did of course underestimate the level of outcry, because they are by nature insensitive. But their protests of innocence represent far too much protesting by a group of control-freaks who now stand accused of pushing everyone else around to get their own way….and experimenting on things. Oh dear.

Other countries are of course playing out their own agendas (upon which I hope to post an essay in due course) but from just this one perspective, two conclusions seem to me pretty obvious. First, there is no way this levy was a Cypriot idea, nor indeed was its formulation devised in Nicosia. And second, nobody’s money anywhere in the world is now safe in any bank .

A sobering thought to take into the weekend.