Euro

Tag: Euro

  • Epilogue: The Euro as Historical Hubris

    The euro is many things at once. Like all other currencies, it is a means of payment, a unit of account and a store of value. Since its inception, it is an attempt to challenge the hegemony of the US dollar as world currency. Insofar as it embodies the transfer of monetary and exchange rate…

  • 2013: A Year in the Crisis

    So here we are in 2014. As this edition of the Euro Crisis blog draws to a close, it is time to say farewell to the readers and greet the new contributors who will take over and comment on the Euro zone crisis as it develops from here on in. Farewells are also an appropriate…

  • Too Much Trust in EU Institutions

    The general impression is that the EMU zone (which gathers countries belonging to, or potentially belonging to, the euro) suffers from a crisis of trust. How can we move forward with European integration when people lack trust in EU institutions? The facts may however be quite different: there is too much trust in the EU…

  • A Not-So-Surprising Accession

    On January 1st, 2014, the day on which the euro had its 15th birthday, Latvia became the 18th member of the eurozone. This accession was prepared over many years and Lithuania is scheduled to follow in 2015, but still this will have come as a surprise to many. Given the predicaments to which eurozone members,…

  • Are we Living in a Post-EU Society?

    There seems to be a paradox: whereas the euro crisis has enforced deeper integration, economic and political attention is shifting away from the EU. Europhiles blame the Eurosceptics but EU-watchers should be careful to follow simplistic reasoning. Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans has the reputation to be an EU-believer and was, among others, a…

  • Do the German elections matter?

    As journalists from across Europe flock to Germany to report on the federal elections this coming Sunday, the question that is asked by many is “Does their outcome matter for Europe?” There is no simple answer to this. Indeed the visions of the major parties on the future of the eurozone and the union as…

  • German Federal Constitutional Court Chews on Role of European Central Bank

    Verdicts from Karlsruhe usually serve as pacifiers for the German public and, more recently, for the eurozone as a whole. Remember the ruling on the ESM and the Fiscal Compact, which the German Federal Constitutional Court concluded was reconcilable with the country’s basic law, or Grundgesetz, in September 2012. What a relief this announcement was…

  • Reckless Spending and Excessive Wage Growth: Myths Debunked

    If I were to pinpoint the two most harmful and most often repeated myths at the core of the orthodox account of the euro crisis, these would surely be, first, that the public debt crisis across the eurozone was solely or mostly caused by reckless government spending; and second, that the fundamental competitiveness problem of…

  • Frau Merkel and the ‘C-Word’

    Both the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have just published findings about the performance of the German economy and the state of structural reforms. While there is plenty of discussions in Berlin about what ‘the others’ (in particular France) are not getting right, there is not much of a debate on what…

  • 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…