An often overlooked point is that euro is not just an economic tool but also a social one, as being able to travel and pay freely in the whole continent is an important unifying point.
And it also makes a difference for a company, as you can set a € price, and it can work for more or less the entire EU.
E.g. in Denmark (although not part of €, but pegged to 100€ ~ 745kr.) you can with full support, do all your bookkeeping/accounting denominated in Euro if you so please, as the danish state allows for bookkeeping denominated in DKK and EUR.
Unfortunately, that isn't really what happens in practice. Although many states share the same currency, they do not share the same wealth or cost of living. You can't just pick one price for your product or service in Euro and then expect that everyone from France and Germany to Greece and the Eastern European states will be able to afford it.
The EU might like to present itself as a single market, and it tries very hard to force people to set one price that applies throughout. However, the illusion is shattered when it comes into contact with the more diverse reality, and there's always a risk when you artificially distort markets for political reasons that you'll do more harm than good.
Setting a price in the US will mean you also exclude people from poorer regions where cost of living and wages are lower. This is not exclusive in the eurozone.
Also, your last argument makes little sense in my opinion. The EU's predecessors itself massively distorted both steel and coal markets to "force" peace and cooperation through the contintent and deal with the age old problem of nationalism and revenge over old wars...
Could that be considered a bad thing because it distorted the markets? I highly doubt many would agree?
I'm not an expert on the relevant policies in the US. Are there laws that prevent charging a different price to customers in one state compared to another, if spending power is much higher in one than the other?
Could that be considered a bad thing because it distorted the markets? I highly doubt many would agree?
I said there was always a risk, not that it was inevitable that any distortion in the markets would be a bad thing. All regulatory actions distort free markets as well, but that doesn't mean all regulation is bad.
In this case, however, we're talking about an EU that typically tries quite hard to prevent businesses from offering something at one price in say Germany and at another price in say Greece. It's quite possible that this prevents some products or services from being financially viable if they are offered at a price the Greeks could afford, while offering the same products or services at a financially viable price the Germans can afford excludes the Greeks entirely, meaning the supplier and/or the Greek consumers lose out either way.
The argument from banks is that there are a lot of online-only banks that rely on the ATMs of banks with physical branches in a parasitic manner.
Which seems like a far saner way to do it imo.
Even for liquid assets with centralized trading reporting, e.g. stocks listed on the NYSE, determining the "market" price is an academic pursuit. (The last traded price for any size? A similar size? The bid or ask? Immediate-execution price or sliced-up execution price? Et cetera.)
For foreign exchange, where trades aren't necessarily reported and occur, de-centralised, at a myriad of international venues and where infrequently-traded currency pairs have a habit of jerking around, such a regulation would be quite tedious to comply with.
I traded forex for many years, and there would absolutely be no problem with this. There are plenty of web-sites where you can see real-time rates.
Of course, I know where to look (big retail forex trading sites are a good choice). General public would probably find something like Yahoo Finance which is not good for this.
People have been saying that for a long time, but one catastrophe after another with the alternatives reminds us that sometimes having a simple, reliable, anonymous means of paying for things isn't such a bad idea after all.
I'm in the UK. A major bank here has just spectacularly screwed up a migration to a new IT system, and for several weeks many people and businesses have been unable to use the most basic and essential facilities. Just this past week, Visa had a major outage and people were unable to buy food in shops or fill up their vehicles. While those were particularly bad instances of things going wrong, it's not as if we couldn't find many more examples going further back as well.
Obviously cash has its own downsides, particularly around counterfeit currency and the costs of handling and securing it. There is no perfect solution to making payments. But I suspect predictions of an entirely cashless society are still a long way from becoming reality for most of us.
You can do payments through mastercard/visa lines, and wired transfers are straightforward.
That very much depends on where you are and where the business or person you want to pay is. In some places, electronic transfers are quick and easy. In some parts of the world, they are expensive, slow, and rely on technology that feels like it came from another era.
The major card networks are the single biggest blight on the payment landscape, because they suck in almost every conceivable way except for being so widely established, but that last point means disrupting them is a very tall order.
FX conversions are straightforward when everyone has a phone.
But many people won't bother to do that conversion. If you're advertising prices in your native currency and your customer has a different currency, that can be a huge barrier to conversion. Most people don't know or care even roughly how much of their local currency equals the advertised price in yours. This effect is at least moderated if you're advertising in a very big currency that some people have encountered before, which basically means the US dollar or Euro if you're in the West.
The Germans clearly have a very peculiar relationship with money. Giving them control of the Euro was therefore a very dangerous idea.
For example, unifying card or other cashless payments to a bigger extent, so that coins and bills become less important.