40 was very anti the euro as a single currency. open market yes. open borders, i was yes. open borders now ? no ! way to easy for the crims to penetrate, rob and kill with no border controls. one currency means not much laundering necessary ...
test below ... Italy .. well just look at how they 'won' or was it stole by fraud ... the world cup.
fwiw. an opinion once more on the boil re WILL THE EURO LAST ?????
Monday view: Why break-up of faltering euro could be the way ahead By Ambrose Evans- Pritchard
(Filed: 18/09/2006)
The disintegration of the euro may be drawing closer. Warnings of an EMU bust-up were once confined to a handful of eurosceptic journals: they have since spread to City banks such as Morgan Stanley and HSBC, and are now moving perilously close to the EU core itself.
advertisement"Will the Eurozone Crack?" is the latest missive from the Centre for European Reform, a pro-euro think-tank with close ties to the European Commission.
"The single currency was supposed to bring Europe together, but it risks becoming a source of economic dislocation and political division," begins the report, a 59-page demolition of EMU by the centre's business chief, Simon Tilford.
"Italy is the country most likely to trigger a crisis. It is not far-fetched to imagine a scenario in which the country is forced to quit the single currency. It could easily force other members to quit the eurozone and could even precipitate the unravelling of the single market," the paper says.
Those of us who have been thundering ever since Maastricht that EMU is a woefully misconceived idea that will destroy the very Europe it was intended to cement, can only say: welcome to the club. In truth, it is a well-kept Brussels secret that many of the EU's own experts fear the euro will blow apart in the next nasty recession, with Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Spain shaping up as prime candidates for ejection.
As The Daily Telegraph's Brussels correspondent, I used to meet for furtive lunches with a Commission economist who was so worried about the coming smash-up that he had switched his savings into "hard" currencies, choosing foreign accounts beyond EU reach. I joke not. He knew, from his ringside seat, that the single currency had been thrust on Europe by the Delors crowd for entirely political reasons in the face of vehement warnings from the pros at the Directorate of Economic and Monetary Affairs.
"They didn't care if there was a crisis one day. In fact they welcomed it, thinking that it would make it easier for Brussels to gain fiscal powers and create a debt union," he said.
This strategy – the Jean Monnet method – seemed a plausible bet at the time, when the march towards closer union looked unstoppable. They never imagined that France and Holland would spurn the EU Constitution, leaving the euro a stateless, orphan currency without the prospect of political union to back it up. The Centre for European Reform says Italy is now at "five minutes to midnight", running out of options after having squandered the windfall gains of EMU entry.
The country has suffered a 20pc loss in unit labour cost competitiveness against Germany since 1999 – (some say it may be as much as 40pc since 1995) – leaving it trapped in perma-slump, at risk of a debt spiral, unable to devalue back to healthy equilibrium. Germany is the flip side of this twisted coin, relying on wage restraint to "steal a march on its trading partners" in a 1930s beggar-thy-neighbour policy.
Germany's trade surplus reached 7.4pc of GDP in 2005, three fifths at the expense of other euro-zone countries. "It is not sustainable for the biggest economy in the eurozone to rely on such a strategy as it risks a self-defeating cycle of competitive underbidding of wages," it said.
It is a withering indictment of a half-baked currency union, foisted upon incompatible economies with varying sensitivities to interest rates. Yet it shrinks from the obvious conclusion that EMU is inherently poisonous, insisting instead that a euro break-up would be calamitous, and must be prevented. But how is Italy supposed to regain its lost competitiveness, unless by deflating wages year after year? Democracies will not take such punishment, as Winston Churchill discovered in 1926 when his gold policy provoked the General Strike, Britain's closest brush with civil conflict in a century.
Such methods would be doomed to failure in any case, since recession would bring about the surge in public debt most feared. Frankly, the sooner Italy escapes the better. Debt service costs would jump by 3pc or so – according to HSBC – but most of this would flow back to Italian residents who own the bonds, limiting the impact on growth.
Handled well, it could be as liberating as Britain's exit from the ERM in 1992.
Spain is not yet in trouble but will be soon given its current account deficit nearing 10pc of GDP, and a 30pc rise in relative labour costs viz Germany since 1999. The Spanish have revelled in the greatest fiesta since Cortes discovered Aztec gold, primed by real interest rates of minus 1pc-2pc. This level of policy error is unconscionable. The dirty secret of monetary union is that the Club Med bloc have been the victims of an ultra-loose interest rate policy set by the European Central Bank to meet German needs, when Germany was down. Of course their booms ran wild.
There is no sign yet that hedge funds are preparing for the kill. German and Italian debt are still treated as almost identical, with the spread on 10-year bonds remaining wafer-thin at 23 basis points. But the eurozone is not a sacred union. The sovereign nations retain the vast bulk of their reserves, and issue their own debt.
At the end of the day, EMU is no more than a glorified system of fixed exchange rates. We know from past shocks – ERM 1992, Asia 1997 – that such constructs can collapse in days if for any reason the markets start to smell blood.
