Euro

Category: Eurozone 2013

  • 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…

  • Help the Bruised French out of the Corner!

    There has been a lot of bad news last week: the Eurozone is further contracting, France is moving into recession and the EU has been dramatically losing support all across Europe according to figures published in a Pew poll. Watching President Hollande’s Élysée address one year into his presidency one saw a cornered head of…

  • Dangerous Fantasies and Really Existing ‘Adjustment’

    It has been two years to the month since the original Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the ECB-EC-IMF Troika and the Portuguese Government. Elections followed shortly after, bringing into power a new conservative coalition government, which proceeded to implement the structural adjustment programme with unbridled enthusiasm. In the words of Prime Minister Passos…

  • Doubts about Rehn’s Position as Independent Commissioner

    Rehn has spoken. Friday 3 May, the independent Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs gave his verdict on the state of the national economies in the EU. His statements were remarkable in several ways and come at a time when he has to prove his worth as an independent Commissioner. France, which has been dragging…

  • On Axes and Party Politics: the End of Europe’s Predictability

    In a commentary last year on the eve of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty I wondered to what extent the notion of ‘the Franco-German axis’ was still a useful framework to analyse politics in Europe. I argued that in the course of the euro crisis, economic and monetary policies in…

  • 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…

  • Halftime in Cyprus

    Analysing the latest acute episode of the euro crisis, Cyprus, on March 26th is a bit like writing a match report at halftime: you’re bound to get much of the story right, but if you try to predict the final outcome, you may very well miss – by an inch or by a mile. And…

  • Getting Cyprus Wrong – and Germany Too?

    The agreement on Cyprus concluded this week will turn out as a burden to policy-makers in Europe for both next steps related to Cyprus and the Eurozone rescue as a whole. The best take I have read so far is by Bruegel’s Nicolas Véron, who in his latest commentary addresses the manifold arenas in which…

  • What a Tomato Can Tell us about the Euro

    In order to form an opinion on the effects of the euro, we could start out from a simple question: what sort of impact had the introduction of the euro on a specific product, let us say a tomato, that a country (e.g. the Netherlands) cultivates and exports? The Netherlands has a strong horticultural sector.…

  • Is there an Alternative for Europe in Germany?

    In my last blog I made the point that despite Germany being a major player in the reform of the eurozone and despite federal elections taking place in the fall of 2013, Germans at the moment seem rather indifferent about the eurozone’s future direction. I found this to be rather baffling, since the decisions taken…