Articles
Background to
current events.
Calm explanations of outages, failures and restrictions. What happened, what it means for payments and reachability, and what you can learn from it in practical terms.
A second home only works as a fallback after preparation
Your own holiday home can offer peace of mind as a place to go to temporarily. But a house in, for example, the French Alps is only truly usable if you can pay, communicate and have power there. That requires preparation on site.
One supplier can affect several banks at once
A bank outage often feels like a problem at one bank. In reality, the cause may lie with a supplier in the background. In that case, a second account helps less than expected.
What the power cut in Spain and Portugal shows
The power cut on the Iberian Peninsula did not last for days, but it immediately affected daily life. Paying, travelling and staying in touch became difficult. That is precisely what makes the event instructive.
The first 72 hours call for more than an emergency kit
The government asks citizens to be able to manage the first 72 hours of an outage themselves. That is a sensible and practical starting point. For those who are also responsible for a family, staff, payments or assets in several locations, further questions remain.
Capital controls can temporarily change access to money
Capital controls are not a theoretical concept. In Cyprus, Greece and Ukraine, legal limits were placed on withdrawals, transfers or payments. The balance remained, but access changed.