EUreaucrats can't understand why people might want their national currencies back. Don't they understand what's good for them?

Who's holding the money on that "Euro goes the way of the Buffalo" Pool?

It's not gone yet, but I drew June of this year.

Steve - They're gonna raise Euros in protected herds and kill some for low-fat meat? ;-p

The Euro always was a bad idea. In the absence of monetary policy flexibility, you need capital and labour mobility in order to adjust for regional economic variations. The US is a good example of this: A single currency that covers a population and territory close to the size of that of Europe, yet with enough internal freedom of economic migration to smooth out much of those local variations in economic fortune.

Europe, however, has too much cultural linguistic and cultural heterogeneity to easily smooth out the local dips and rises in the absence of monetary policy fluctuations. The result has been an monetary policy designed to better suit the mature, slow-growing economies of France and Germany, not the young and vibrant economies of New Europe.

The result is that fast-growing countries joining the Euro zone are trading their ability to set growth-friendly low interest rates for nominally easier access to trade due to a common currency. However, given that the world already has plentiful currency exchanges and forward markets, and that both of these have become very swift and frictionless in the electronic age, one wonders whether the trade-off ever made sense in those terms.