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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the answer the euro? Stable, inflation proof, light or no sanctions. As brexit proceeds and more financial services move to mainland Europe, you won't even have to worry about the brits messing with it...

I seem to remember the EU agreeing to setup a psudo bank to deal direct with Iran so they can bypass restrictions on trade?

Edit: here it is! https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/eu-mechanism-for-...

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Definitely not the Euro. Its not only not inflation proof infact because poorer country will need higher inflation that's exactly whats going to happen. It's not stable, Brexit, Greece, spain, italy have all gone through a lot of recessions. Not to mention they don't have a central bond market. The Euro can't really ever be a replacement.

Didn't the whole Greece debt situation show why that could be a problem? One country's debt crisis caused the euro to tank 30% in a very short time. It ended up rebounding, but pretty much forced the EU to handle the situation (write off debt and provide low interest loans for the rest) or risk the whole thing exploding.

It seems like your betting on 5-10 countries not failing, when with most currencies you just have to deal with 1.

Which is probably why it's not currently the reserve currency, one would assume.

Greece was fiasco for Euro.

It's a lesson learned now, and ECB will hold binge spenders on a leash.

UK can leave EU, Greece or Eastern Europe can not.

It’s more that the Euro has been a fiasco for Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain... It’s fundamentally problematic to have a single exchange rate between countries with different inflation rates, balances of trade, etc. - because you can’t have an exchange rate that works for everyone and the value can’t move between the other economies to balance out the differences.

The only way around that (apart from going to separate currencies with floating exchange rates) is to have some kind of fiscal balancing method. In the US, for example, federal taxing and spending tends to do this between the states. But that is probably politically impossible in the EU (redistribution from richer countries to poorer is pretty unpopular).

Very easy to do, and that's actually what ECB is now doing as I understood.

They now enforce the limit of how much debt a country can sell, and at what terms much more rigorously

Every country sponsoring a currency approaching the reach of the dollar will begin to experience the same political forces as the US. Weaponization of the currency in the service of foreign and domestic policies is viewed as a cheap alternative to war. And so the pressure to weaponize will sooner or later become irresistible.

The Euro doesn't look great either. The EU's sovereign debt crisis gets worse every year. The economic growth of the region is predicted to lag the US. A rising banking crisis is being swept under the rug. An aging population. The EU proved during the Cyprus banking crisis that they will reach into bank accounts and confiscate deposits.

The thing is any currency that took over would be used for similar ends.

> Isn't the answer the euro?

Only 19 out of the 28 european union members use the euro. So I don't think the euro (a 19 year old currency ) is the answer. Unless something changes, then in the future it might be one of the answers.

> you won't even have to worry about the brits messing with it...

The brits never adopted the euro as their currency, so they never messed with it to begin with.

> Stable, inflation proof, light or no sanctions. As brexit proceeds a

Stable... brexit. The problem with the euro is that its political foundation ( european union ) seems weak. With britain leaving the european union, with the EU sovereign debt crisis and potential for further problems in the near term, it's more likely the EU will break apart and the euro discarded than the euro will replace the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. Being the reserve currency of the world requires the political and military backing of a stable superpower. For all our problems, the US isn't losing states like the EU is losing countries.

If the dollar's stranglehold in the world break, we'll probably get regionally dominant currencies. The dollar will still dominate the western hemisphere. The eastern hemisphere will be dominated by regional economic powers and their currencies.

> the near term, it's more likely the EU will break apart and the euro discarded

That's not likely at all.

it's all but certain that the EU will start to break up in 12 days time

(whether or not it will stop there is a separate question)

There are countries waiting to join the EU. Some go, some come. Since 2000 thirteen countries have joined the EU.

1. the expansion is over. last expansion resulted in some pretty nasty stuff. from massive EU fund corruption to a member leaving. 2. on this last point, how many hundreds of albanias would you need to replace the particular qualities the brits were bringing to the table? the only thing the EU can do is bring Russia onboard. something France and Germany are already doing, to the horror of the Eastern Europeans and the US

The expansion is not over. There are still european countries wanting to join. Btw., the UK (especially Boris Johnson) was a proponent of more countries joining the EU.

France never wanted the UK in the EU in the first place. Maybe they were right? The UK was boykotting deeper EU integration on political, economical and defense levels, so after the UK leaving we may expect to see some progress.

Boykotting Russia everywhere leads us nowhere. Cooperation does. Russia is not even a candidate joining the EU. We have Turkey in the line of countries - which is not liked by many EU countries, but PROMOTED by the current UK prime minister. Even the US has requested in the past the EU to take Turkey as a member.

The US foreign policy is the current horror. Last time the US lawlessly invaded Iraq with a coalition of the willing. Now the US has many more countries unwilling to follow the foreign policy adventures of the least qualified administration since decades.

A country like Poland sees with horror, that the US is no longer clearly committed to NATO.

the UK was one of many countries objecting to the current form of the EU. this will not go away with one member leaving.

the EU is expecting another round of new participants in 2025. and the countries are the likes of Macedonia and Serbia. of course the EU politicians are already arguing about this, since the last expansion was a small disaster: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/eu-en...

personally i don't see how the EU can expand without major reform.

countries like Poland and Romania are strong Nato allies looking in horror at Germany and France cozying up to Putin. the US simply expected the two western countries to pay up. they preferred to pay Russia instead.

Major EU reforms, which were blocked by the UK, for example.

Good relations with Russia is in the interest of the EU countries.

Europe has been trying to build good relations with Russia for as long as anyone can remember. But in the end it takes two to tango.

Maybe you can‘t remember those times, but I knew germans who were invading the USSR. I spoke to one who learned russian in the USSR in military prisons in siberia - he having served in the Waffen SS. I grew up in the cold war times. Then we saw the collapse of the USSR and its block. We‘ve made a lot progress since then. There is a russian view to that and we also need to listen to that, too.

What's the Russian view we need to listen to?

Is that a real question?

For example the views of the Russian population.

Example : https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/08/21/russians-say-t...

The view of Russia about the NATO expansion towards their border is widely reported. We can ignore that or think it is unfounded, the reality is that these views influence the Russian politics.

Russia does not get to dictate which organizations free nations join or do not join.

So basically how the US acts? See middle east, south&middle america...

Unfortunately, I don't get what you mean. Which organizations is the US barring these countries from entering? Is your solution to them the same that they should listen to the US views as well?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/10/were-staying-us...

just days ago...

The EU is more likely to break apart than it is to become the world reserve currency.

Neither makes sense. What will happen though , is that EU countries will make sure that more monetary independence is possible and that blackmail attempts by US government will not succeed. Trump has used that to undermine the European politics towards Iran. Trump is also using this as a threat against the EU and certain EU countries.

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