The Euro, aged ten years and a day

The Euro will survive, first because it is simply too big to fail, and secondly, because Germany will suffer greatly if it fails.

Personally, it made life much easier for me when it was introduced. At the time I was travelling a lot, and ended up carrying four different different currencies around. The Euro reduced the wear and tear on my pockets.

The idea that the Euro is solely responsible for the current, world-wide, economic crisis is deeply silly. The origin of this crisis lies in the USA. The collapse of the Euro will not solve anything, but would cause severe problems, starting with the collapse of the European financial system. And last time I checked, Britain was quite intimately linked to that system

I do wish the Euro-septics would stop singing their tired old songs. The notion that Britain can somehow preserve itself from the consequences of such a collapse is frighteningly naive. Those people who insist that the Euro must fail, and that this will somehow be a good thing, are like turkeys incoherently gobbling their approval of Christmas or Thanksgiving.

The Euro will survive, first because it is simply too big to fail, and secondly, because Germany will suffer greatly if it fails.

Personally, it made life much easier for me when it was introduced. At the time I was travelling a lot, and ended up carrying four different different currencies around. The Euro reduced the wear and tear on my pockets.

The idea that the Euro is solely responsible for the current, world-wide, economic crisis is deeply silly. The origin of this crisis lies in the USA. The collapse of the Euro will not solve anything, but would cause severe problems, starting with the collapse of the European financial system. And last time I checked, Britain was quite intimately linked to that system

I do wish the Euro-septics would stop singing their tired old songs. The notion that Britain can somehow preserve itself from the consequences of such a collapse is frighteningly naive. Those people who insist that the Euro must fail, and that this will somehow be a good thing, are like turkeys incoherently gobbling their approval of Christmas or Thanksgiving.

For Prof. Morris and the usual anti-EU discussants here at TE: would you care to comment about Iceland, Hungary et al., European countries that are in serious financial and fiscal troubles WITHOUT the Euro?

You are aware, aren't you, that the UK is in Europe?

How can anyone be so in favour of a project such as the euro for the seemingly mundane and unimportant reasons of making it easier to go on holiday or for businesses to be marginally less uncertain with regards to exports when the cost of such an underwhelming list of achievements is stacked up against COMPLETELY WRECKING what was before its invention the world's RICHEST CONTINENT. It's mind boggling.

Has it proved its worth? I've seen no study which substantiated that claim, and many to the contrary. Be careful not to conflate the euro with the single market.

Heaven is where the police are British,
the chefs Italian,
the mechanics German,
the lovers French,
and it's all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German,
the chefs are British,
the mechanics French,
the lovers Swiss,
and it is all organized by the Italians.

When all Euro Members are equal in their work ethic, ambition and fortitude, then we will have a stable basis for economic union.

Until then the rich will subsidize the poor and resent them.
And the poor will gratify the rich and resent them.
Equality is a myth; Inequality is the norm.

And we exist in a big dystopia.

I remember sitting with a friend discussing the mixture of contortion and pantomime just completed by Italy to enter the Euro. We thought it laughably apparent that Italy and the other weaklings would remain in the Eurozone for precisely as long as Germany would pay to keep them there. The German government lied to its citizens, and the lie has come home. To be honest, I have been amazed that it took so long.

I too was living in Europe ten years ago and felt the agony of Apollo’s Curse, recorded in a letter written on the 8th January that year:

Our three daughters are back in school after the two week Christmas break, and in the shops the process of replacing Lire with Euro is going more or less smoothly. At the local supermarket the cash register shows prices in both currencies. You can pay in Lire but the change that comes out of the till is Euro. As each lire note is handed across for the very last time the checkout operator stuffs it into the money belt she is wearing. At the end of each day they go off to the bank to be counted and then destroyed.

On the first morning there was a small riot at the local Banca Popolare when a woman at the head of the queue produced a huge shopping bag filled with Lire coins and asked for them to be counted and exchanged for the new money.

There has been speculation that the changeover might spark a small consumer boom as tax-evaders all over Euroland dig out their black Francs, Pesata and Guilder from under the mattress and spend them before they cease to be legal tender at the end of February. The banks will continue to accept them for another ten years, but that might lead to awkward questions from the Guardia di Finanza.

And after February, what then? Most disinterested economists seem to think that Euroland is not a terribly good currency union because of its poor labour mobility. So long as inflation remains under control in Germany and France all will be well. But if the German economy should recover strongly the ECB will have no hesitation in raising interest rates regardless of the consequences in out-of-the-way places like Portugal or Ireland.

Ironically, in the very week the Euro was introduced, Argentines were learning first hand the danger of tying one’s currency to a far away country where economic conditions can be very different from those at home. They’ve now devalued. In Australia, Victorians may remember with bitterness how their manufacturing base was devastated in 1990 by the policy of 20% interest rates which the then-treasurer Keating introduced to stamp out asset price inflation in Sydney.

Of course the driving force behind the Euro is not economic but political. It’s supposed to engender a feeling of European national identity.

Apollo’s Curse has no remedy. It strikes again even in this article:

how can you have a single currency without some single body to determine fiscal and monetary affairs …

Woe! Woe! Woe!

The pretty schemes you imagine will solve your problems have been tried before. They will not play out as you imagine.

And Apollo has lost none of his irony.

Just as the Euro was rolled out in the very same week that Argentina was forced to break its tie with the United States dollar, so the Eurocrats’ push for fiscal union is occurring even as the United States reveals the dreadful endgame of such union.

Fiscal union does not operate automatically like some beneficent robot. It involves political agents making taxing and spending decisions. Surely if there is any lesson to be learned from the eighty years since US fiscal union was perfected, it is the impossibility of granting political agents the flexibility to respond to unforeseen economic events while simultaneously preventing that vast power of discretionary expenditure being used to run up unsustainable public debts.

And my daughters?

The youngest has just turned eighteen and is setting off to travel the world. In her pocket she carries a card. Electronic money. Six currencies. It may be topped up from a computer terminal anywhere in the world.

The ultimate irony of the Euro? It purported to solve a problem that was in any event disappearing. But that’s another prophesy.

I doubt the flawed Euro currency will last the year; at least not with the present 17 members. The socialistic/communistic mirage of Europe has been exposed for the huge lie that it is. The politicians and bureaucrats that caused the problem are unlikely to be capable of solving the mess they created with their lies. They created banks to buy their bonds and now all are insolvent. Taxpayers will be very angry with more bailouts of stupid corrupt bankers by stupid lying politicians. Especially as taxpayers realize the taxes and costs imposed on them based on the unproven IPCC theory of "CO2 causes global warming". AS one IPCC researcher emailed his fellow fraudsters "They will kill us if they find out". He may be a better forecaster of taxpayers' actions than climate models.

Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France struggling—against plenty of people’s odds—to save the euro zone from a split,

Long may the Euro expose the smarmy sycophants that are leading us through this crisis - apart for the money; we are all really good friends.

"Long may it live!"

Amen :)

Long may it live indeed! ...if only to make us Americans feel better about our own problems.

Greece woke us up to the sovereign-debt crisis it seemed as though the euro was as solid as, well, the dollar.

I don't think one wants one's currency to be "as solid as the dollar".
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TWEXMMTH?cid=95

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2?cid=29

Regards

Could have been worse. Imagine if Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Zimbabwe were all in the Eurozone.