GULP: Nigel Farage to Europeans: "Get Your Money Out While You Can"

Nigel Farage is a conservative British politician and an elected member of the European Parliament. Farage has been a longstanding critic of the EU and its fragile monetary structure, but even he was taken aback at the announcement that they would seize Cypriots' bank deposits.

What's really happening here is that we have an irreconcilable split between the north and south of Europe. In particular I'm thinking about Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland and there are very strong political voices saying, 'We do not want to go on bailing out southern European countries.' And bear in mind that Cyprus is now the fifth country out of 17 that's needed to be bailed out. And that is why the Germans extracted the terms that they did...

Even in my direst predictions of this parliament over the years -- about the way the EU bosses were behaving -- never did I think that they would resort, in an unprecedent manner, to stealing money from people's bank accounts...


[The EU] can't afford Cyprus to fail, it can't afford Greece to fail, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland. They know that if one country goes, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. And countries like Germany will realize vast losses, possibly as much as one trillion Euros. So they are prepared now to do anything -- literally anything -- to try and keep the Euro afloat and that is why they've now resorted to, as I say, as what can only be described as theft.

And now they've done it one country, they're quite capable of doing it in Italy, Spain, Portugal, or anywhere else. And the message that sends to people with savings in banks in those countries is, certainly if I was them, get your money out while you can...

What the British government needs to do is to say to the hundreds of thousands of pensioners living in Spain is, for goodness sake, get your money out of that country and have a monthly transfer to pay your bills...

[The message is] Don't invest in the Eurozone. Do. Not. Invest. In the Eurozone. You've got to be mad to do so, because it's now run by people who don't respect democracy, don't respect the rule of law, don't respect the basic principles upon which Western Civilization is supposed to be based.

They are propping up a Eurozone that is, in the end, going to collapse in a disastrous failure and they're prepared to do anything to do so. I think this decision... the German-dominated nature of this decision... is the worst decision we've seen so far in this whole Eurozone crisis.

In what is perhaps a simple coincidence, Germany's Commerzbank has helpfully suggested a 15 percent wealth tax in Italy to drive government debt down to "acceptable" levels.