A Right and Proper Death of the Euro

[marmar]

from truthdig:


A Right and Proper Death of the Euro

Posted on Apr 17, 2013
By William Pfaff


When the proposal was initially made for a common European currency, it seemed to this writer to be a good idea, with the flaw that it wouldn’t work. Although inexpert in economics (being a product of the age of arithmetic), it struck me as an effect of a false analogy with the United States that was common in Europe at that time.

If New York, Texas and Iowa could have a single dollar currency, why couldn’t France, Germany and Italy? Europe already had—or was completing—the single European market, free of tariff barriers. Why not a single currency for the single market? A great many enthusiastic supporters of European unification seemed to think that all that was needed was to give it a name and design, and then print it up.

Thanks to the imaginative former French President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a fine history-redolent name already had been given to the mechanism that would lead to the single currency, the “Ecu,” which meant “European currency union,” and happily was also a French proper name, given during the 17th and 18th centuries to a series of small gold or silver French coins.

When the time to create the currency itself finally arrived, the chauvinists of other European Union countries balked at the French name, and the currency was drearily named the euro (not even capitalized) and bore exceedingly boring drawings of bridges and viaducts. (Every euro-zone country had a bridge or viaduct, so each could say that it was its own pictured.) ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_right_and_proper_death_of_the_euro_20130417/