Quote:
Originally Posted by Respenus
While I understand your concerns over the EU and the euro (let's just say that the whole ordeal has been as botched up in the worse possible manner, threatening the existence of the common market and the prosperity and stability of Europe), what do you think will happen if the euro went away? The financial markets (damn them to hell while we're at it) and more importantly, the common market, which would find itself in a big crisis due to convergence and exchange issues. Do you have any alternatives in mind which would ensure stability, yet without the current structure?
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No, and I doubt anybody has. It's a bit like an emergency landing on a foreign planet. You now know you shouldn't have taken the trip, you meanwhile have learned that your rocket has shown to work unreliably, but your engine is failing and you need to go down. Once you have, you only have to choices: stay in your capsule and sooner or later die from suffocation or dehydration for sure (thats the status we currently have), or daring to open the door and see what's out there - and risk to get killed by the alien atmosphere.
Or not.
The point of it all? We shouldn't have gone there: not into euroland (and not into space, in that metaphor: not with that faulty rocket). And now you ask me how to get out of he messwithout risks and without losses? I think that is impossible.
I am not about avoiding damage and guaranteeing stability. I am about limiting already present damage that constantly increases , present and future one, I am about limiting the damage to the ammount that cannot be avoided. If you want no damage at all, you shouldn't have gone this way into Euroland. Abandoning the Euro will do massive damage to European economies, and the german economy as well. Possible that in global competition we will not recover from that in our lifetime. The alternative, however, is worse: stay with the euro, no matter the costs. The costs will strangle us, first the rich nations, than the poor. The way the Eu tries to turn Germany even more into the paymaster for the irresponsible smaller nations in the south, really has rang the alarm bells.
So, in a nutshell: with your question I think you simply are a bit too late. The times of "stability" are far behind us.
Add to this the fact that we have approached paytime for the bill we have mounted over the past five decades so irresponsibly. That makes it even worse. We have not even responsibly managed economies and wealth while we were wealthy indeed and our economies ran fine. We did not care to stockpile reserves and to save for the times of emergency we should have expeted to come. Now they are here, by our fault, and they find us not only unprepared, but even having put ourselves in highly damaged positions, without need. If we could not evben live by the income we made when the economy where massively booming, how less we can live with our current ways with the minimal growth rates we can expect even if from now on it all would run optimal for us? We live and lived beyind our means, making debts even in boom-times. So what do you expect...?
That's not just a gale ahead of us. For some nations it could become a white wave. Wet and cold we all will get, and very much so. I am relatively sure that some european nations will collapse. That is an obvious conclusion with so many candidates for that.