Thank Goodness for the Euro
...which has saved us for the time being.
This is the essence of today's editorial in The Observer by Will Hutton, where he writes:
'In fact, the existence of the euro has, until now, been a bulwark against disaster. Suppose it had not been created and that the financial crisis in 2008 had broken over a Europe with multiple floating exchange rates and no European central bank – the eurosceptic utopia. The Irish, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, Italian and French banking systems would have stood alone and they would have collapsed in a domino effect, interacting with the mega-crisis in Britain and the US. Even some German banks would not have been immune. There would have been a 1930s-scale slump, the break up of the EU and a rise in beggar-my-neighbour devaluations and trade protection.'
According to Hutton, the problem is not the Euro itself, nor is it politics. The problem is the biggest crisis of global capitalism for more than 100 years - potentially bigger than 1929, and the failure of the politicians to solve it. Read more here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/euro-crisis-recession-europe
Dr Giacomo Benedetto
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
You can thank your own God for the Euro. I for one am glad that the UK never adopted it. The sooner we remove ourselves from all this European nonsense the better.
The UK has no right to be so smug. Let's remember that Sterling has devalued against the Euro by around 30% in the last 10 years, from 1.6 euro to the pound, to approximately 1.15 at present. If the UK is doing so well, perhaps you could explain how it is that sterling was worth 12 Deutsche Mark back in 1960 and is now worth little more than the equivalent of 2 Deutsche Mark.