Did you cash a check today?  Or with­draw mon­ey from your sav­ings account?  Or use your deb­it card to buy a sand­wich?  If so, many Cypri­ots wish they were you.

The head­line is that Euro­pean lead­ers reached an agree­ment with the Cypri­ot gov­ern­ment that will keep the island nation in the Euro­zone.  For more than a week, Cyprus had teetered on the brink of default, as the gov­ern­ment tried to come up with a plan to raise 5.8 bil­lion euro in a way that would please the Troi­ka (Euro­pean Union, Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank and the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund) with­out send­ing its own peo­ple into a fury.  The troi­ka had set today as the dead­line.  Absent a solu­tion it deemed accept­able, it would not shell out the 10 bil­lion euro Cyprus would need to prop up its wob­bly banks, send­ing the coun­try into bank­rupt­cy and out of the Eurozone.

The good news is that the Cypri­ot gov­ern­ment met the troika’s terms just ahead of the dead­line .  And they did it with­out con­fis­cat­ing mon­ey from bank accounts with bal­ances below the insured lim­it of 100,000 euro, as an ear­li­er failed deal with the troi­ka would have required (See my pre­vi­ous blog post).

But while the gov­ern­ment agreed to keep its hands off deposits of less than 100,000 euro, con­sumers may have a hard time get­ting their own hands on their deposits.

That’s because the deal’s fine print includes a long list of pos­si­ble “cap­i­tal restric­tions.”   My guess is that you haven’t seen the fine print and maybe don’t know what a cap­i­tal restric­tion is.   Sim­ply put, these cap­i­tal restric­tions pre­vent you from doing what you want with your money.

The gov­ern­ment of Cyprus is impos­ing these cap­i­tal restric­tions because they are wor­ried about two things their peo­ple might do: 1) take their mon­ey out of the banks; and 2) send their mon­ey out of the coun­try.  Gov­ern­ments and finan­cial insti­tu­tions care a lot about the lat­ter restric­tion.   One of the prin­ci­ples of the Euro­zone is that the cur­ren­cy can flow freely from one Euro­pean coun­try to anoth­er, just as a dol­lar can be sent online from a cus­tomer in New Jer­sey to a mer­chant in Mon­tana.  In the case of Cyprus, how­ev­er, there is grave con­cern that if free flow of cap­i­tal is per­mit­ted, big investors will move their euro out of Cypri­ot banks (say, to Ger­man banks) or even out of the Euro­zone entire­ly (say, to Swiss banks).   But restrict­ing this sort of activ­i­ty can dam­age big finan­cial insti­tu­tions that have to move large sums of mon­ey across bor­ders quick­ly.  So Euro­pean offi­cials are busy assur­ing Wall Street and heavy hit­ters every­where that these restric­tions “may only last a few days”.  That remains to be seen.

The aver­age per­son, though, is much more con­cerned about restric­tions that the gov­ern­ment may place on con­trol of his or her own account.  Access to this mon­ey doesn’t involve finan­cial spec­u­la­tion; it’s used for much less exot­ic things like pay­ing a bill or cash­ing a check.

And this is where the con­se­quences of the deal get real for ordi­nary Cypri­ots.  They’ve been cop­ing with the biggest and ugli­est cap­i­tal restric­tion since March 15.  The banks closed that after­noon and haven’t reopened since.  They will remain closed “indef­i­nite­ly,” although the gov­ern­ment ordered banks to restock ATMs dai­ly, giv­ing cus­tomers at least lim­it­ed access to their funds.

To pro­tect banks from their cus­tomers once they do reopen, Par­lia­ment has giv­en the finance min­is­ter pow­er to impose a long list of restric­tions on con­sumers.  These include:

• Bans or restric­tions on check-cashing;
• Restric­tions on use of cred­it, deb­it and pre­paid cards;
• Ban on ear­ly with­draw­al from cer­tifi­cates of deposit (CDs), along with require­ments that CDs be rolled over once they mature;
• Require­ments that sav­ings accounts be con­vert­ed to CDs;
• Ban or restric­tion on open­ing new accounts;
• Restric­tions on trans­fers of mon­ey to oth­er banks; and
• Any oth­er con­trol mea­sure that the min­is­ter or gov­er­nor will deem nec­es­sary under the cir­cum­stances for rea­sons of pub­lic order and safety.

Even with­out that last catch-all author­i­ty, this pow­er is pret­ty omi­nous.  It means that after you’ve earned your mon­ey, paid tax­es on it, paid your bills and still man­aged to set some aside in a bank account, the gov­ern­ment can keep you from using it when you need it.

That’s quite a price to pay for a bailout.  It may not be as bad as the tax on insured deposits that the Cyprus Par­lia­ment reject­ed, but it is a real price and one that con­sumers will actu­al­ly see.

Like Cypri­ots before this rude awak­en­ing, we’re not aware of the many unseen costs we incur to keep the finan­cial ser­vices sys­tem func­tion­ing.  We pay hid­den fees, like the “swipe fee” that banks col­lect when­ev­er we use our cred­it or deb­it cards.  We bear the costs of main­tain­ing fed­er­al insur­ance on our check­ing and sav­ings accounts, though these costs are nei­ther trans­par­ent nor obvi­ous.  More sub­tly still, peo­ple who have man­aged to save mon­ey are pay­ing the price, in the form of minis­cule rates of inter­est, of a long-stand­ing Fed­er­al Reserve pol­i­cy of allow­ing banks to bor­row at near-zero rates.

The finan­cial ser­vices sys­tem, like our health care sys­tem, does a great job of con­ceal­ing its costs from con­sumers.  That may or may not be a bad thing, but it’s worth rec­og­niz­ing that you’re not real­ly get­ting some­thing for noth­ing from your friend­ly neigh­bor­hood bank.

It’s also worth remem­ber­ing that if the banks need to be bailed out again, the gov­ern­ment will present you with the bill.  Don’t be sur­prised if that next bill looks a bit like the one the Cypri­ots just got.