Tag: Eurogroup
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Will France Become like the Netherlands or the Netherlands like France?
To understand the euro project we need to go back to 1989 and the frustrations over exchange rate adaptations under the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). France was frustrated by the hard Deutsch Mark and, occasionally, lost billions on aligning the FF to the DM. Mitterrand used the German unification as a lever to get…
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Dijsselbloem or DijsselDoom – a Dutch Perspective
I already presented my reservations against the appointment of Dutch Minister of Finance, Jeroen Dijsselbloem (Labour Party) as President of the Eurogroup. The public outrage following the bankruptcy of the banking sector in Cyprus has raised new questions concerning his ‘presidency’ (for which in Dutch the more modest ‘chairmanship’ is used). My initial doubts concerned…
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Dijsselbloem as Eurogroup President – Curse or Blessing for the Netherlands and the Euro?
Finding suitable chairpersons for EU meetings is extremely difficult. Since ‘presidents’ can be politically quite threatening they should preferably come from small countries. They should be rather gullible and non-threatening people. As our euro notes prove, the EU has no shared values and that makes chairing particularly difficult. The design of the euro notes was…