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Next week, when lurgies picked up in northern Europe last week have passed, you will be getting a proper analytical piece out of me.
This week is a shameless plug. Did you know that Bloomberg Terminal users can access an exclusive three-month trial to my flagship Sapienta Country Analysis Cyprus by accessing the Sapienta Economics corner of Bloomberg and hitting the request the trial button?
I think you can get to it by keying in {SNEC51}. If that does not work try {SEOR} to get Sapienta Economics.
Why do you need independent analysis on Cyprus?
Outside the OECD radar. Cyprus is a small European Union country in the Eastern Mediterranean with an all-island population of around 1.4 million. It is a member of the European Union and the eurozone but, because of the ongoing Cyprus problem, it is not a member of the OECD. These factors - small size, absence from OECD statistics, a complicated political problem - mean that most large institutions dedicate few resources to the analyzing country.
Risks can be mis-priced. For example, at the economic level, Cyprus is often left out of comparative economic analyses that pull data from OECD countries. When something big happens (e.g. Iran war, Ukraine war, Covid-19, global financial crisis, local financial crisis, high-level Cyprus problem negotiations), international analysts tend to second-guess what is going on. This leads to a misunderstanding of risks and therefore, quite likely, a mis-pricing of risk. This mis-pricing can be in two directions. Sometimes international analysis is too bearish and sometimes it is too bullish.
On-island independence is rare. Another issue with analysis produced by local institutions is independence. Most institutions in Cyprus have a commercial or political interest in persuading you to invest here or keep your money here. We have no such affiliations. We make no investments in Cypriot shares or bonds and we have no party political affiliations. This means we can make an honest assessment of the situation. Sometimes things are better than they appear (for example, immediately after sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2022) and sometimes they are worse than they appear (in the run-up to the Cyprus financial crisis in 2013).
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