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In Luxembourg, Finance Minister Luc Frieden has warned that the example set in Cyprus by taxing people holding €100,000 ($129,000) or more in their accounts could drive investors out of Europe. "This will lead to a situation in which investors invest their money outside the eurozone", he told Spiegel. "In this difficult situation, we need to avoid anything that will lead to instability and destroy the trust of savers."
In the European Parliament, politicians are considering ways to make banks bear greater responsibility for their own financial problems. The EU currently guarantees all deposits under €100,000, but this policy was called into question two weeks ago after the finance ministers of the eurozone decided to make small-scale savers contribute to the bailout of the Cypriot banking sector.
Under current EU policy, private creditors will not be required to cover banking imbalances until 2018. But in Germany, Andreas Dombret, a board member of the Bundesbank, the country's central bank, would like to implement the new rules much sooner, by 2015. And Carsten Schneider, the budget policy expert for the opposition centre-left Social Democrats, says he believes the rules for winding down banks should be implemented as soon as 2014.