also can you suggest a place where I could read more about this? its awfully confusing, and somewhat counter-intuitive and it would be helpful to read where someone has presented this idea in a paper or article or something.
The issue is that, normally when a country with its own currency is economically uncompetitive, its currency weakens, which helps give a boost to domestic industry by making their exports cheaper than those of richer nations. So there's a natural corrective function to economic fragility that helps these countries get back on their feet. The Eurozone breaks that corrective mechanism: without the Euro, right now e.g. Greece would have a weak currency and Germany a much stronger one, which would help Greek industry because their products would be cheaper than Germany's. But since they're all using the Euro, Greece can't get any kind of comparative economic advantage.
To accomplish the same without an independent currency requires managing this movement in nominal terms. If the problem is that the country is basically broke or uncompetitive, and needs to solve this by "getting cheaper" compared to other countries, everything in the country has to get cheaper simultaneously. Wages have to go down in €, housing has to go down in €, etc., and this all has to happen in a coordinated way so everyone can still pay their now-lower rent with their now-lower wages, and so on. Economists call this "internal devaluation", i.e. achieving the same effects as a currency devaluation while not having a separate currency, by just lowering actual prices for everything.
The consensus seems to be that it's difficult to pull this off successfully, and really good positive examples are rare. It's complicated by just the general difficulty of coordination, as well as longer-term contracts (e.g. most people's rent and wages don't get renegotiated monthly). Greece has been sort of doing this through consistent single-digit deflation, but it draws it out over a long period. Many (though not all) economists think the result is worse than an all-at-once currency devaluation would've been.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/george-soros-on-...
My memory of such isn't perfect, and I won't reread all dozen-ish pages for the sake of an HN comment, but I remember it covering some of the issues of Eurozone integration, and seems very topical given this thread is about Soros.
Yes, and that makes German products more attractive, boosting German exports. Germany gets a boost to their export, at the cost of importing at higher prices. Because Greece's currency is artificially boosted, they can import relatively cheaply, but they have trouble exporting because their exports are too expensive, so money is leaving the country.
>If a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation.
I sell SaaS software on a subscription basis to customers all over the world. They pay for our service in USD, which is then converted to EUR when I get paid from the company.
If the Euro was stronger, which it would be if it were only the currency for Germany, I'd get less Euro when that conversion happened, and I'd have less local currency for things like rent, groceries, etc. The Euro being artificially depressed against USD absolutely benefits anyone who either personally or via their company exports products, including stuff like SaaS. Since exports are the backbone of the German economy, it has a very concrete benefit to most Germans. Greece's economic problems literally mean I get more cash.
But wouldn't you be able to still buy exactly the same stuff with less (but stronger) Euros?
This is true in most places without particularly volatile currencies, though in countries that do have very volatile currencies, things like rent have historically been specified in stable currencies like US Dollars, Deutsche Mark or Euro.
Surely things like rent take longer to reflect an increased demand but they do eventually catch up.