If coronavirus sinks the eurozone, the 'frugal four' will be to blame | Hacker News Reader

If coronavirus sinks the eurozone, the 'frugal four' will be to blame

theguardian.com

14 pointsrickdeveloper15 comments

I don't know if this is typical of UK journalism, culture or if it is just The Guardian's way of doing things but the article is filed as a normal (economic) news piece yet the whole thing is filled with opinions of the author. Even the very headline of the article is an opinion.

The Guardian's Comment is Free section is opinion. It's a blog.

I'm kind of confused about what you are saying; When I click on the link I land on a page where the "News" tab is highlighted and beneath it the sections "Business > Economics" are printed in bold. Looks like a news article to me? I don't see anywhere that this is actually a blog post?

If you look at the URL you'll see "commentisfree".

I think that this is down to the Guardian's politics - cultural relativism means prioritising one piece of writing as "news" over another as "opinion" is invalid.

I've got to say, having watched the journalism sausage factory in action while running a newspaper, I'm not entirely opposed. Journalists routinely choose what sources to cite and which to ignore. News is often, if not always, manipulated to communicate a political point of view. Dropping the pretence and presenting all news as opinion (or all opinion as news) seems at least honest.

The Euro was a massive mistake.

Economists can barely agree on how monetary supply works in a single country's economy, why not stitch a bunch of them together and see how it goes?

If you believe even a small part of Modern Monetary Theory has any value, tying multiple sovereign nations to the same currency is simply not an option.

> The Euro was a massive mistake. Economists can barely agree on how monetary supply works in a single country's economy, why not stitch a bunch of them together and see how it goes?

EU members are exactly like states in the USA. They each have their own independent economic interests, their own independent sets of laws governed by central overriding principles and legislation, and they share a currency.

So you may as well be saying that the US Dollar was a massive mistake.

Steve Keen is a good source on this:

https://braveneweurope.com/steve-keen-the-delusional-leaders...

https://braveneweurope.com/steve-keen-the-euro-is-a-suicide-...

Ok, how does Steve Keen feel about the USA reverting to pre-1792 colonial currencies?

Us States are not equal to European countries in any of the ways that matter here: they can’t have their own central banks or issue their own currencies, can’t decide general banking policies, can’t control trade in any meaningful way.

A better analogy of US states to Europe is provinces of a country - their economic powers are extremely limited, and on the scale of macroeconomics, nearly meaningless.

Well it's not like economists are totally unaware what effect the Euro would have. It's been known for quite a while that you can't have a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement and independent monetary policy.

At the video conference, the eurobond motion came up against the eurozone’s “frugal four” – Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland – who argued that the issuance of a common debt instrument would punish the countries that had saved for such a rainy day, and encourage further fiscal mismanagement by those who did not.

Politically this seems impossible to fix. Even though those countries gain by the weakness of the Euro they will never agree to the transfers necessary to fix it. It's unpalatable to their electorates.

Care to elaborate for economics novices why would the issuance of coronabonds/eurobonds strengthen Euro?

Is it because foreign investors would seek Euro to invest in new lucrative bonds? Any other factors?

why would the issuance of coronabonds/eurobonds strengthen Euro

Care to elaborate where I actually said that?

What is the larger point of this Eurozone now days? The Netherlands sound a lot like Britain.

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