The calm reaction of the people in Cyprus, waiting in line at the banks, is an indication that they are willing to take a hit, and just get on with it. This is a first for everybody and so the whole world is watching the developments. There was nothing they could do about it.

Check the insurance limits in the country where you keep your funds, as limits may vary. In the Eurozone it is up to a limit of €100,000.

You will soon realise that keeping money in a bank will erode away, as inflation eats away the capital, as interest rates are low. The high interest rates should be looked at with care,as it mught just be a case of too good to be true.

Cyprus will get back on it's feet in time. There are many professionals coming to Cyprus and although the Corporation Tax has been raised to 12.5% it is still favourable compared with other countries. Remember, you may still take advantage of the low tax regime, conduct your business from Cyprus, and keep some of your funds in Cyprus for cash flow, and still keep your corporate funds in another country of your choice.

The property market will fall , that is for sure, but in time, it will pick up, maybe after a few months.

The other Eurozone countries are looking at Cyprus, and they are expecting the same treatment. Malta, Luxembourg have equally overblown banking sectors, and are becoming very nervous.

If you have made the research and decided to come to Cyprus, but have been put off by recent developments, think again. The worst is over, we all know what the score is, and we are all just getting on with it.

Luxembourg is the granddaddy of them all when it comes to banking systems. It has assets of 2,700% of GDP or about 4x what Cyprus had. A loss of just 4% of it's banking assets would be greater than all the goods and services produced in the country for a year.

The main problem with all of the banking systems that are very large in relation to it's GDP is that they all are tax havens and have strong banking secrecy laws to attract capital from people that are trying to evade taxes or launder money. In itself, that is not the reason to be cautious of those banking systems but the secrecy means that there is a lack of transparency so therefore it takes a much longer time to determine that the banking system is in trouble and to what extent and by the time that is determined, the capital has vanished and the country is too small to save the banks.

Then they are at the mercy of the EU or IMF to try to save the banking system. In the case of Ireland, the EU and IMF did save their banking system (but reduced it's size) but at a large cost to Ireland since it became straddled with debt and therefore unemployment skyrocketed. In the case of Cyprus, it will likely never again have a large banking system but be burdened with about €10bn of debt. It may have been better for Cyprus to completely dissolve all of it's banks that were insolvent by paying off insured depositors but taking a haircut on the money from uninsured depositors. This way they would not have the debt to contend with. Instead they only made one bank insolvent to come up with the €5bn needed but there is still about €10bn worth of losses in the remaining Cyprus banks and that is what the EU loan is covering. Even if they would have to leave the Eurozone to do that, I suspect that would have been a better way to handle the situation.

The infusion of €10bn by the EU is very similar to the concept used by many gamblers. If you bet enough, maybe you will recover your losses. However if they are going to bet, they should have bet the whole €16bn since then the banking system would have basically remained in tact keeping most it's depositors giving it a much greater chance of pulling off the near impossible. By betting only €10bn, the chances are greatly reduced and the chances of being repaid the €10bn by the Cyprus government is slim since the economy is not large enough to pay that amount.

What's to stop this from happening again in Cyprus? I am sure many people will be afraid to invest in any country which has gone down this route. We were thinking of eventually retiring to Cyprus but not a chance now - you realise just how vulnerable you are in these small communities. It's a bit like the last depression in the 1920's, the poor are poor so it does not make any difference to them - you cannot take what they dont have, the wealthy lost a lot but were still wealthy, its the middle classes as always which get hammered. Good to see the cost of oil going up as well because they think America is coming out of recession but they have a debt twhich would scare anybody (makes Europes problems seem academic) and have done little to stop it increasing. Those guys think they will never have to pay it back! Scary or what.

You are watching too many conservative news programs. $16 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual deficits sounds very bad but when you delve into the real figures, it's not as bad as it looks.

First the US does things differently than most European countries. The US government has trust funds such as social security, medicare, government employee pension plans, road maintenance fund from gas taxes, and other trust funds which amounts to about $5 trillion. Although there is a lot of money in those funds, the general fund borrows that money and issues treasuries to the funds. So therefore public debt (debt that the public and foreign countries hold) is what is important and not the national debt which is about $11 trillion or about 70% of GDP which is lower than Germanys national debt which is the same as their public debt.

As far a the $1 trillion deficits, that was originally about $1.4 trillion and has been falling primarily due to the fact that the unemployment rate has been dropping bringing in more tax revenues and less government assistance. This year the deficit will likely be down to about $800 billion unless congress screws up and enacts austerity programs which will cause unemployment to rise, government assistance to increase, and tax revenues to decrease.

An $800 billion deficit for a $16 trillion economy is only 5% of GDP which is actually better than most European countries. Ideally that should be reduced to 3% or less (about $450 billion) but won't likely get that low until the unemployment rate drops to about 6%.

During the past recessions, the US has always led the world out of a recession since it is a large importing cohesive economy. Even though Europe has a larger economy, it is not cohesive (some countries may be implementing austerity measures while others are implementing growth measures) and therefore can't lead the world out of a recession. Although the German economy is healthy, that really doesn't help Europe since Germany is an exporting economy which just takes away jobs from other European economies.

The big question is that since the recession was so deep, can the US economy improve fast enough without the help of Europe before all the countries go bankrupt.

All they were really after was the Cyprus natural gas resources. If Cyprus has a problem repaying their debt, the Troika will demand a slice of the energy resources in return.

Interesting comments - the country which is "owned' by China? We live next door to you and people here think the same. You seem to have a government system which cannot agree on anything. We have a system in Canada where the people cannot agree on anything! Thanks for the cheap gas and everything - its most welcome. As I said before, who started the last great depression? The synergies are very similar. There is one place I would not want to live and thats the USA. Arrogant and very ignorant people.

Cyprus will come good again, in fact it is already good. There is a sense of, hell, this has happened for the first time in the world, and it has happened to us.

We are moving on, taken the hit. Just visit Cyprus for yourselves, and see for yourselves.

Do not believe the media hype. If you do, then you really should not come to Cyprus at all anyway.

Seeing is believing! It really is that simple. Come here and speak to the people, get your information at ground level. Then decide.