Remember JFK standing before the throngs of Germans and declaring "Ich bin ein Berliner"?

Now imagine Ben Bernanke standing before the throngs of Cypriots and declaring that he was a Cypriot, a Cypriot politician sticking his hand into your savings account.

Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the Cypriots knew the short cut to Bernanke's Quantitative Easing end game.  They just bluntly proposed taking the money from the accounts rather than fiddle with the cover up of printing money and devaluing the currency in question.  Quicker, shorter and to the point.

Simplicity is poetic, isn't it?  Recall the old joke about foreplay. "Bertha, are you ready?"

Milton Freidman many times said Inflation is the invisible tax.

And the oldest game on earth is knicking a multitude (dollar holders) just a little, so they don't notice immediately.  Raise large sums of money with just a few drops of blood at a time.  Bernanke's way.  The Cypriots will just take a pint and leave a thank you note. Take your pick.  The blood level drops either way.

It also helps when the demon you are supposed to guard against, inflation, is measured by you and conveniently by your own metrics, inaccurate as they may be.  (Let's leave food and energy out).

Bernanke is trying his darndest to implement that" invisible" tax by killing interest rates, ignoring Federal Reserve mandates of maintaining "moderate interest rates," disincentivizing savings and encouraging Federal deficit spending.

The Cypriots have it correct.  Just do it. Don't lie, pretend, feign, and deliver tepid speeches at conventions in Jackson Hole and Davos.  Just take it and quit pretending.

And quit lying.

Bernanke, the most powerful man in the world without an army, is the artist. Ben does the Fed Astaire across polished waxed floors. The Cypriots do the John Wayne saunter as they reach out and declare, "I'll take that." Who would suggest that those who simply take a per cent age of savings from the savers is somehow more dishonest in their machinations than the slow dance from the Federal Reserve?  The net results are equivalent.

Maybe not saving your money is a good idea after all.  Especially, when those savings  can be raided to pay for  the ineptitudes, greed and graft of those in the upper strata.  Or should I say Wall Street and Congress?