You don’t need any economics to grasp what Europe and the IMF have just done to the Cypriots. Anybody can imagine how awful it would be to wake up one morning and discover that their savings have just been raided. Over the previous four “rescues” of bust eurozone countries, the details have always been swaddled in technicalities: debt restructuring this, fiscal consolidation that. With Cyprus, however, an immediate tax of up to 10% on savings accounts needs little explaining. Officials may euphemise it as a bail-in but everyone else will agree with yesterday’s Daily Mail headline: it’s a bank robbery.