Ouch! The euro’s causing so much pain these days it’s hard to remember why I ever loved it. But I did.
Like many Europeans I had great hopes for the single currency. How could I, especially when it’s increasingly clear that it can’t work in its current form? Hope got the better of rationality, not just for me but for many others.
The hope: Trade would flourish across national boundaries as the inherent risk of doing business in foreign currencies was eliminated.
Business leaders hate uncertainty so, the logic went, if we could make sure the value of money was the same across the continent then business would boom. Without a single currency the cost of imported materials could skyrocket if your currency plummeted. Such events can quickly turn forecast profits into actual losses. The single currency was the answer, we thought.
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