Euro

Tag: Eurozone

  • What is EU Membership all About?

    This is my last entry in the Eurozone 2013 blog. I want to conclude with some general remarks tackling what sounds like a rather innocent question and is the subject of a paper I am working on: What is EU membership all about? The question was put to me for a talk at a summer…

  • Parallel Currencies are no Alternative for the Euro

    Many are upset about the ‘TINA-type solutions’ for the euro crisis. ‘There-is-no-alternative’ (TINA) seems to have been an irrevocable characteristic of the euro right from the start. A sense of ‘having been forced onto the people’ was kindled by the fact that in most countries the single currency was adopted without referenda. Subsequently, many of…

  • The Eurozone Crisis: Finance 2 – Society 0

    An interesting and crucial feature of the eurozone crisis, which hardly ever gets mentioned, is the extent to which it corresponds to a massive, lengthy, disguised and undemocratic process of socialisation of debt relations. What started out as a massive build-up of debt/credit relations between private debtors and private creditors has been gradually converted into…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The French Squeeze

    There are signs that the economies in the eurozone are picking up in various ways. Recent figures of the ECB on Target2 (the capital account of the eurozone countries within the ECB) show remarkable signs of improvement. The claims of the triple-A countries Germany, Finland and the Netherlands on the problem countries are going down.…