“The U.S. government is very unlikely to just seize money wholesale from people’s bank accounts, as is being done in Cyprus. But does that mean that your life savings are safe? No. If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save, before you are even aware, much less alarmed. That is in fact already happening. When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about ‘quantitative easing,’ what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do — and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/03/26/can_it_happen_here_117629.html