Reuters reports that the European Union is preparing to freeze withdrawals and ATMs when banks are "failing or likely to fail", in an effort to "save creditors' money". Of course, this ignores the fact that the people trying to withdraw their own money are, by definition, such creditors to the bank.

The European and American banks have both been stated to live on borrowed time. The Euro is fundamentally on shaky ground, after trying to combine economies with as fundamentally different characteristics but without the fiscal policy instrument to enforce conformity. Meanwhile, the US dollar has been printing as much money as it can since August 15, 1971, when the United States defaulted on its loans and obligations. (It wasn't worded like that, of course, but the net effect was still that the US cancelled payment on its international loans.) Both of these spheres of economic influence can be predicted to undergo serious disruption as bubbles burst in rapid succession, when they burst: the precise time is impossible to predict, just as it is impossible to predict the precise point in time of an avalanche or a volcano eruption, but at the same time completely possible to say that such an outcome will happen at some point.