Euro Debate

The Economist website is currently featuring a debate among a number of well-known economists on the future of the euro – you can find it here.

5 replies on “Euro Debate”

Gobbledegook from failed prophets!

Writers can be hired to put pen to paper and create moods or impressions, insights or emotions. It is propaganda and is always easy to spot.

What do you know? Why assume these folks know more or better? Because you paid for their opinion? That means it can be ignored.

Shre values will fall, joining property as markets fail due to the failure of demand for debt. Do you want more debt? No one does, especially as we now know it is poisonous. Worse! You own part of that debt! It was extended by your banks and insurance companies investing on your behalf! Geniuses, all these money managers! Not. Stop giving money to these people and stop voting for incumbent politicians!

It is interesting, but not surprising, that the speakers for and against are, respectively, US and European-based economists. The US is able to mitigate detrimental outcomes of poor economic governance via implicit devaluation because the dollar remains a global reserve currency. The EZ, in the absence of comprehensive political and fiscal union, requires economic governance of an expectionally high quality. Most of the core, and weighty, members, have exhibited a record of being able to step up to the plate – or, at least, close enough to it. Woeful is a poor word to describe the quality of economic governance in the PIIGS. They had their chance to be responsible, but they blew it. Now they will feel the smack of good economic governance – and they will get it good and hard.

It would be good, though, if the German and French governments were to explain to their voters that the massive sovereign debt support package is designed, to a considerable extent, to bail-out their pension funds unwisely invested in the PIIGS and is not a freebie for the profligate. And it would also be good if this were presented in the context of the attempted global strategic positioning of the EU and the ever closer political and fiscal union that this entails.

And finally, let’s give up any ideas of exercising fiscal sovereignty in Ireland. We had some, we blew it and it’s gone. Why not just lie back and think of Europe. I have the sense that most Irish voters have assumed this position – and probably find it not entirely without its pleasurable sensations, given the painful shafting they’ve received from those whom they’ve elected.

@ PL,

As to ‘a debate’ on the Euro, I would like to insert one small point if I may. I enjoyed watching an PBS documentary On the Rails, this evening. But what I observed from the interviews, was the young men riding on the trains in the 1930s saw what society was really like. They had an opportunity to hear the real conversations that were happening in real places, where real families were struggling to scrap a living. One of the interviewees went on to play a part in the civil rights movement in the south in the United States. He talked of when he went to school in the depression years, it was impossible to ask his teacher a question about social issues. The teachers response would normally be something like, I’m hear to teach you about geometry. I think we are somewhere like that in our development as a society in Ireland as it stands. One observation I would like to make, is that many of the Eastern European migrant workers who came to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger bubble, really had a developed social consciousness. They didn’t mind at all, breaking into an impromptu conversation about social matters. That always fascinated me about people I met, for instance, from Poland. I didn’t seem weird to them, that one would discuss social issues in the company of a group of other people. They expressed themselves about such matters very openly. We don’t do that here in Ireland. My parents generation in particular I believe had inhibitions in that sense. I reckon (just throwing a daft idea out there), the reason we have to talk with such bravado about economic well being in Ireland (during boom years), is that we want to avoid having other conversations. I can only hope that the generation maturing in Ireland today can see fit to engage more in an open conversation with our European partners. BOH.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1502653730

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