…cannot hold together. With France joining the rest of the PIIGs, it’s hard to see survival of the Euro, except perhaps in Germany and the Netherlands. They may reach a point at which it just makes sense to go back to the guilder and deutschemark.
12 thoughts on “The EU”
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I’m hopeful that France will be forced to abandon this folly. Support for the euro is high in the eurozone, supermajorities both in parliament and among the population support it.
This WaPo article illustrates why France is a bigger problem than Italy and Spain:
No one can agree on how to fix Europe (in one crazy Venn diagram)
Monti and Rajoy deserve the support of friends of liberty.
(looking at crazy Venn diagram)
EIB investments? Limbaugh has some ‘splainin’ to do 🙂
The EU…pronounced “Ewwweeee!”
Maybe they will even go back to the gold standard 🙂
FWIW if you do the math on the Eurozone as a whole the situation is less acute than in the US. Now that they already did what I guessed they would do to attempt to solve the economic crisis (slash salaries, pardon part of the debt, etc) there is still one solution which hasn’t been tried.
Federalism. Currently each country contributes a fraction of its tax income to the EU in an indirect way. If they replace that with a federal taxation scheme which is funneled directly to the EU (e.g. a flat tax all over the EMU) then there is enough capital (or future capital) to start a Eurobonds scheme for EMU countries that could be direct towards infrastructure development, guarantee deposits, or other extraordinary economic measures.
We should kick California out of the dollar.
Why not simply let them default? It’s not as if they can print dollars.
If someone breaks the rules (like Greece, which never meet the Maastricht criteria), it doesn’t matter, if it do as part of “confederation” or as part of “federation”.
The issue with the Maastricht criteria is that France and Germany made those deficit limitations rules and then broke them. So if they can’t be bothered with following their own rules why should anyone else?
FWIW if you do the math on the Eurozone as a whole the situation is less acute than in the US.
Name a US state that owes more than its annual GDP. They don’t get enough revenue to owe that much, not even California or Illinois. There are several European countries that have passed this threshold.
And the central EU government would then have more power than it already has to borrow money. I don’t see centralization of power improving the situation at all.
Currently each country contributes a fraction of its tax income to the EU in an indirect way.
What do you mean in an indirect way? Each country pays its “dues” to the EU, sounds pretty direct to me.