The Cyprus bailout may please the Germans, but for Cypriots years of pain lie ahead The verdict of Finance Minister Michael Sarris was that Cyprus had avoided a "disastrous" exit from the eurozone. But after a few years of this "medicine," Cypriots will be begging to differ. Cyprus is about to embark on drastically painful surgery to shrink the size of its banking system as a share of its economy from seven times to around three times over the next five years, tapping €4.2bn from its richest depositors with savings over €100,000 to do so. Hammering savers makes little sense for the sake of the rest of the eurozone periphery, where those with deposits of more than €100,000 will be jittery. But politicians in Germany are purring because they can go to the polls saying that they are not throwing taxpayers" cash at a bailout of Cyprus's offshore banking business and (alleged) Russian money launderers. For the Cypriots themselves, the devastated banking sector threatens a credit crunch which could double the nation's unemployment rate of 14.7 per cent. Capital controls passed by the parliament meanwhile put the nation in a surreal netherworld: it still uses the euro, but if people face severe limits on the amount of money they can move out of the country, it can't be said to be part of a single market. It hardly encourages investors to pump in the funds the island will badly need in the coming years.