|
Euro Investment Opportunities Economic archaeologist Michael Wilson unearths evidence of a primitive currency found off the coast of Great China - the euro Archaeologists examining the submerged flatlands of what used to be known as western Europe have uncovered fascinating new documentary evidence of an early attempt at a multi-country currency that seems to have enjoyed a brief popularity around the start of the 21st century. Euro Investment Opportunities & The Once-Mighty US Dollar Although it is still too early to be certain of all the facts, the euro (as it was called) appears to have staged an ill-fated attempt to challenge the power of the once-mighty US dollar as it approached the peak of what we now know as the ‘Bush Bubble’. The fact that the euro fell so quickly to raiders from abroad, and that it disappeared so soon afterwards, has shed new light on the mysterious crash that was to extinguish all economic life on both sides of the then Atlantic Ocean - thus leaving the way open for the Chinese resurgence which, as we know, has dominated the planet for the last 800 years. Scientists still differ in their opinions about what this doomed European attempt at monetary union might have achieved if it had succeeded. While most insist that the euro experiment was nothing more than an evolutionary blind alley, there are others who believe that its failure represented the greatest loss to human civilisation since the sinking of Atlantis some 8,000 years earlier. Thanks to the new discoveries, however, we can at last firmly pinpoint the beginning of the trouble to 2001, the year when the NeoSoros invaders first mounted their attack on the upstart currency. Euro Investment Opportunities - Western Europe Around this time, we already know that western Europe was entering a period of political and economic estrangement from the United States, its friend and military protector for much of the 20th century. The problem was not merely that the Bush Dynasty was steadily withdrawing its US interests away from Europe and into the twin-hemisphere trade bloc that would become known as Greater America. It was also that Europe, with its 400 million inhabitants, had spent the last two decades growing in a fundamentally sound way that contrasted with America’s speculative, concept-driven economy. Yet Europe’s high levels of trade self-sufficiency clashed stridently with the Bush Dynasty’s dogged insistence that all significant world trade developments must still involve the US as a key player in some way or other. So Europe decided that the moment had arrived to set up a credible joint alternative to a US economy which it saw as being puffed up with empty rhetoric - and whose currency, the dollar, was certain to collapse if the underlying confidence in its stability should ever decline. What Europe needed first, though, was a single domestic currency, the euro, which would free it forever from the uncertainty of fluctuating dollar exchange rates, both within itself and in its trade with outside countries. The potential benefits for Europeans would have been enormous. Euro Investment Opportunities - 15 Core Countries The problem was that western Europe at this time was not a single country with a single political structure but a loose federation of 15 core countries, plus another dozen or so associate members. Its various tribes spoke 20 or more different languages, and its disagreements over political development were already causing major problems. Its many governments had many different ideas about how their economies should be run - some favoured fast government borrowing to fund fast subsidised growth, while others insisted on austere and fully cost-accounted policies that would never allow overspending - and it was difficult to instil any general confidence in the future direction of fiscal measures without drastic measures from the centre. Fiscal sovereignty So drastic measures were taken. The price that the 12 early members of the so-called Economic and Monetary Union group (EMU) paid for their admission to the euro club was that they placed a large part of their fiscal sovereignty in the hands of a new European Central Bank. The ECB was allowed, for instance, to dictate all bank lending-rate policies across the whole group; more importantly, however, it also forced them to promise that they would not overspend on their various national budgets, so as to minimise the amount they needed to borrow in the bond markets. Euro Investment Opportunities & This No-Overspending Pledge Why was this no-overspending pledge important? Because the value of any currency always depends to some extent on the amount of government debts that are outstanding. The more debts, the bigger the potential for future price inflation and the less the markets like it. So, if the euro group was going to share a single currency, it would be crucial that no one member state should sabotage the collective effort through reckless coverspending. 
|
RSS Feed