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Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

This article is absurd.

The cost of doing so would be gigantic. Nobody in Europe would want to pay that.

Actually the Euro was introduced to keep Germany under control:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/historischer-deal-mitt...

Without the Euro the Bundesbank had controlled the most important currency, the Deutsche Mark, alone. Many countries in Europe had been depending on the Deutsche Mark anyway - without being able to influence any decisions.

The Anglo-Saxon press is obsessed with the Euro. I've been reading a lot now over the last years about the Euro - mostly written against it. Article over article predicted its death, often within days or weeks. The Euro is still there.

Instead the articles get more laughable day by day.

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Its still German interests that dominate € policy.

The ECB still has in its mandate 'price stability' which means that it just doesn't do any inflation north of 2%, no matter what, which is an age-old German fetish. Which also pretty unreasonable because the deflation and close to zero inflation exacerbated the Great Depression - and we are in a depression again.

Actually the Euro was introduced to keep Germany under control

This is the essential part that is overlooked by most commentators. The Euro is predominantly a political instrument that is going to be kept alive at almost any cost necessary. Therefore its interpretation should blend out most of economic "rationality" but consider instead underlying goals such as the equalization of the standard of living across the European states.

The Euro is a political instrument. It had original been introduced to keep us Germans under control after reunification. But there were other reasons:

* a single large market which is competitive on a world-wide scale needs its currency

* less dependence on the dollar

* use it as a tool for further integration

* stabilize countries. This may look funny given what you read all day, but when the Euro was introduced many countries were either recovering from fascism (especially in souther europe) or communism. Having a large currency makes it much more difficult to speculate against these countries. The Hedge fonds are speculating against the Euro and they have a really hard time to bring it down - like they did with other countries.

But the Germans would not have agreed if it hadn't also brought direct advantages. The one big advantage is this: trading in the Eurozone is much much easier and cheaper with a single currency.

I may have missed this but what countries were recovering from fascism in southern europe when the euro got introduced?

AFAIR the last fascist there (colonels' regime in greece) ended in the '70s, while the closes thing I can think of as the euro (ECU) just had dracma added to their average a decade later.

You mention Greece; there were also Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco) and Portugal (Salazar).

This post is full on.

> But the Germans would not have agreed if it hadn't also brought direct advantages. The one big advantage is this: trading in the Eurozone is much much easier and cheaper with a single currency.

They agree to it in part because the became a garantee that it will be stable but I agree that the Euro has some quite good propertys.

It also gave Germany a cheap currency to help it's exports.

If the Euro had been German/Netherlands/Luxemburg it would have been very stable, very strong, and so expensive that even Goldman Sachs bosses couldn't have bought a Porsche

Nobody buys a Porsche because it is cheap.

lispm: IMO the author of this article is knowingly proposing something absurd on purpose. See my post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4094584

Nobody in Europe would want to pay that unless the alternative was even more expensive.

The alternative that is seriously feared right now is the complete dissolution of the Euro.

And such undemocratic machinations are a really good reason to abolish the Euro. Or don't you like democracy?

What's a democratic money?

Either or fallicy.

what?

I think the parent may be referring to some of the undemocratic elements of the European Council, or the bailout fund that was proposed a while back to be run by a separate body to the ECB.

Have a look at voting rights in the EU and relate them to the number of inhabitants.

Agreed.

It seems to me that especially American and British led news agencies seem to deliberately try to undermine the Euro zone with anti-Euro-propaganda. I'm sick of hearing how bad it all is, while it isn't, and it's much worse elsewhere.

I'm from Austria, and we are doing just fine, with low unemployment numbers, a growing economy and general optimism for the future. The Euro helped us a lot, and we are able to help other EU states through it.

Stop listening to entities like "Bloomberg", they seem to be wrong a lot.

The Euro is like a gold standard. If you are doing good and somebody else does not its not the golds fault.

I think the ECB did some not so good things and I think inflation targeting is a idiotic policy but I dont really want to blame the ECB for any of this.

To blame are the institution of the country (and whoever is at fault for the housing bubble but I dont want to get into that).

Spain would have been hit hard by the bubble anyways but it was unreactiv government that let its spending get out of hand.

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