It makes you a mug, because you are making out you have knowledge of a subject, you clearly don' fully understand. Sophisticated investors are NOT the middle income families caught up in the BOC levy, I for one feel for these people most will have worked hard for their money and they are watching it being stolen in front of their eyes, it may mean the difference of their children having a university education, a deposit on a new home or the wedding of their daughter. The BOC levy is unprecedented in Europe and now it is part of the EU banking future, it can effect any country or any bank in the EU.
Here is what Sophisticated investors have to say about the BOC levy. Analysts and politicians compared the bailout plan, the first to include a levy on deposits that were considered to be insured, to government-sponsored larceny, and said it would cause a run on banks across Europe, if not a full-fledged global crisis.
"The very nature of banking has been shaken to its roots with this decision, for banking depends upon trust," Dennis Gartman, the investor, wrote in a note to his clients. "Trust that has now been shattered; torn asunder, broken ... destroyed."
Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, called the decision an "astonishing move" with "little thought of contagion to the rest of the euro zone, and indeed perhaps the world."
Mark J. Grant, a market commentator who has been predicting an economic apocalypse in Europe for years, went so far as to compare the terms of the bailout with "rape." He said: "Pay attention please. The European Union and the European Central Bank and the I.M.F. have just advocated the confiscation of private property for their own indulgence."
Then we have peterweg from Battersea, London. '
Deposits over 100k are not guaranteed. I wouldn't have been caught by that BASIC fact so how does it make me a mug? The mugs are the idiots who are going to lose 20% because 'deposits are not investments'.