“There were stories of pain, too, at IndyMac, but in the U.S., we paid little attention to it,” Mr. Kirkegaard said. “This will impose a lot of pain on Cypriot society, but the outcome will not be that much different.”

IndyMac, when it was rescued by American regulators in July 2008, had become the ninth-largest originator of mortgage loans in the United States, relying largely on large, uninsured deposits to finance a lending spree in some of the riskiest areas of the housing market.

And while the American government backed savers with deposits of less than $100,000, those with more deposited at IndyMac were required to accept a loss of 50 percent when it declared bankruptcy. (The federal government helped prevent a broader panic by later raising the deposit insurance threshold to the current $250,000.)

As the Cypriot government begins investigating the misadventures of the Bank of Cyprus and the second-largest, Laiki, bankers and lawyers in Nicosia have begun to argue that the disastrous venture by the Bank of Cyprus into Greek bonds could well have been avoided.

Local bankers say the bank had more or less sold out of its Greek bond position by early 2010 as Greece’s problems became evident.

But then, in late spring of 2010, as an international bailout of Greece looked increasingly likely, the Bank of Cyprus plunged back into the market, buying 2.1 billion euros, $2.7 billion, worth of the troubled bonds, lured by the increasingly high yields that went with the risk. At the time, the bonds were trading around 70 cents on the euro, and bankers say that, in essence, when the Bank of Cyprus bought the securities, it was betting that the loss, when it occurred, would be less than the market had expected.

Such a risky strategy is frequently used by hedge funds dabbling in distressed debt. But it is generally not seen as the expertise of large, deposit-reliant institutions like the Bank of Cyprus.