Home » Posts tagged "euro"

Tag Archives: euro

The UK faces a €149.2 billion liability to the EU


The Bruges Group’s latest report has exposed that the UK is facing a maximum potential loss of €149.2 billion on its financial commitments to the EU and the Euro. The report reveals the full extent of our obligations in respect of the present and future debts of EU institutions including: How the Government’s defined position is questionable in law and therefore has led it to underestimate its full potential exposure to EU debt; and That the true extent of the […]

Tags: , , , , , ,

The EU: who governs whom?


Via France election: Germany rules out reworking EU’s ‘fiskalpakt’ – Telegraph. Mr Hollande has called for a shift in strategy toward more growth-oriented measures including more public spending. But Mr Seibert said Angela Merkel would not accept “deficit spending” to feed economic expansion, and believed in “growth through structural reforms” such as reducing the cost of job creation as pursued by Germany over the last decade. I feel sure Mr Hollande’s socialist ideas are dangerously daft but if he cannot govern […]

Tags: , , ,

Philipp Bagus explains how to overcome obstacles to Euro exit


Via Is there no escape from the euro? Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that there are important costs to exiting the euro, such as legal problems or the disentangling of the ECB. However, these costs can be mitigated by reforms or clever handling. Some of the alleged costs are actually benefits from the point of liberty, such as political costs or liberating capital flows. Indeed, other costs may be seen as an opportunity, such as a banking crisis that […]

Tags: , , , ,

Why Is There a Euro Crisis?


From a magnificent article by Philipp Bagus – Why Is There a Euro Crisis? Today’s banks are not free-market institutions. They live in a symbiosis with governments that they are financing. The banks’ survival depends on privileges and government interventions. Such an intervention explains the unusual stock gains. On Wednesday night, an EU summit had limited the losses that European banks will take for financing the irresponsible Greek government to 50 percent. Moreover, the summit showed that the European political elite is […]

Tags: , , , , , ,

Remarks on the Eurozone crisis at the People’s Pledge Congress


At the People’s Pledge Congress today, I appeared on a panel discussing the political implications of the Eurozone crisis. I would have loved to focus on democracy, freedom and the rule of law but the cause of the crisis was the key theme. As ever, I blamed our statist, inflationary monetary arrangements for creating the incentives and institutions which supported such dreadful behaviour and outcomes. I went on Russia Today (who asked) to discuss the campaign afterwards. You can find my speaking […]

Tags: , , , , ,

The greatest gift to the Greeks might be to let them go it alone – Telegraph


There comes a moment in any decent tragedy when the penny finally drops. The light breaks. The protagonist suddenly realises what a chump he has been – that he has somehow managed accidentally to marry his mother and kill his father – and that all his assumptions about his life are upside down. And the really awful thing about the tragedy now playing on the streets of Athens is that we haven’t even reached that bit yet. Read more via […]

Tags: , , , ,

On Vickers: it’s time to end the fantasy that we can consume without producing


I’ll blog shortly about the Independent Commission on Banking’s Interim Report but, as I see Spain is thought by some to be next for a bailout, this quote from Mises’ Causes of the Economic Crisis seems apt: In discussing the situation as it developed under the expansionist pressure on trade created by years of cheap interest rates policy, one must be fully aware of the fact that the termination of this policy will make visible the havoc it has spread. […]

Tags: , , , , ,

It’s not our job to save the euro – Telegraph


Via It’s not our job to save the euro – Telegraph: The failure of the euro will signify the failure of the European ideal, and that is why eurocrats fight so hard for it. What should have been a club of free-trading nations over-reached itself, and sought to unite people with little or no common culture, politics, language or economic history into one coherent federation. It could never work. The generation that thought it could is either dead, senile or (in […]

Tags: , , ,

Embrace Default! » The Cobden Centre


Via Embrace Default! » The Cobden Centre: There is a myth circulating, and I am not sure whether it has its origin in sloppy thinking or devious manipulation. It is this: sovereign default in the euro-area is the biggest threat to the euro’s survival. Really? Why? The euro is a form of paper money, just as the dollar, the pound and the yen is paper money. Paper money is backed by – nothing. It is an irredeemable piece of paper. It […]

Tags: , , , , , ,

Legatum: Euro set to fall apart one by one, warn top economists


I just received a press release from Legatum as follows: Eurozone set to fall apart one by one, warn top economists The small, debt-ridden countries on the fringes of the European Union will soon start dropping out of the Euro, according to a major new report by two top economic think-tanks from both sides of the Atlantic. The experts predict that the staggering £70 billion bail-out of Ireland, underwritten by UK taxpayers, agreed at the weekend is doomed to fail. […]

Tags: , , ,

← Older posts