Euro

Tag: Netherlands

  • EMU Crisis, Barroso and the Inter-Institutional Balance

    The start of 2014 marks and important turn in the EU: the euro crisis seems over, everyone is getting ready for the ‘this time it is different’ election campaign for the European Parliament, and the EU has to come to grips with a new president and, possible, a new balance in the inter-institutional relations. It…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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.…