Nick, it really comes down to the politics of the individual Eurozone states. Something tells me Germany doesn't want to have to continually bail out these more profligate governments every time a shortfall comes up in the foreseeable future. You have a more optimistic view of the Euro than even most central bankers!

 

And I think you're right, the USD is going to fall hard in due time. But before then, it will be the strongest fiat currency. That'll give the US government license to inflate - after all, inflation is somewhat masked when other currencies are inflating at an even faster rate. The end result will be a huge economic disaster that the current batch of politicians want to put off on the next batch.

 

It's really sad that there isn't more of an international outcry to end central banking and peg currencies to a particular weight of gold. Humanity is doomed to continually repeat its mistakes as long as it doesn't understand how economics works. This is really kindergarten stuff - don't let people print money, even the government - but people are so brainwashed they think these bankers are necessary for the survival of the economy. They never were! Europe needs a Ron Paul.

this, here who said there was no problem -and so made it worst to the point we are now- was the president, saying there was no economy problem here when we cared to crack some basic economy sectors beforehand :dozey:

bankers warned him to not keep wasting money as he was and so, but to all he act deaf.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=azCbhNNMdg98&pos=9

 

"There's No Money Left".

 

Amazing how it's happening everywhere at once - UK, Spain, Portugal, Greece, US...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=azCbhNNMdg98&pos=9

 

"There's No Money Left".

 

Amazing how it's happening everywhere at once - UK, Spain, Portugal, Greece, US...

yes, question is, do the governors parties have anything to do?

It's way too expensive to change back. :P

+1000000000000

 

But the price has gotten really high with the Euro (when I converted things in Francs sometimes, it's just crazy how thing have become exepensive!!)

 

Don't ever use one in a French petrol station, they go a little mental at you:embarrassed:

:laugh3: the 500 billet is rare, only rich people have it (or people that work illegally (black work?)...So shops have special machines to detect if it's a fake.

 

As for the Euro, like fietssleutel said, it would be too expensive to change back (and France will not go back to Franc btw...that's utopic). All economics agree thaht the idea of Euro itself is not bad, but the way it was done (the rules with et..) was just doomed right from the beginning... It was sure it will fail. And France, Spain and other country will be in the same situation as Greece in a few years..... :confused:

+1000000000000

 

But the price has gotten really high with the Euro (when I converted things in Francs sometimes, it's just crazy how thing have become exepensive!!)

 

 

:laugh3: the 500 billet is rare, only rich people have it (or people that work illegally (black work?)...So shops have special machines to detect if it's a fake.

 

As for the Euro, like fietssleutel said, it would be too expensive to change back (and France will not go back to Franc btw...that's utopic). All economics agree thaht the idea of Euro itself is not bad, but the way it was done (the rules with et..) was just doomed right from the beginning... It was sure it will fail. And France, Spain and other country will be in the same situation as Greece in a few years..... :confused:

as far as i know, Spain has been helped by EU already, with 50millions i believe, as Greece has been helped. :thinking:

 

so sad but i'm waiting we declare bankrupt sooner than in few years, i don't believe our current politicians here will do face the problem and fix it, unemployement rate is yet so high, things are hard to sell, and we produce few, not to mention the stock market situation that is a huge rollercoaster now.

a lot of useful time has been wasted so it only made the problem worst, as he kept denying advices, calling them 'anti-patriotic' :wtf:

 

before xmas president said measures will be taken to help young people get a job, and get fix jobs, but all i know is 6 months later most my friends are unemployed or doing temporal jobs. :dozey:

 

i also know people who get lotta € now, oh mystery, he promised tax discounts before the elections, and magically he won. democracy eh! (when now it is a 'fake')

 

worst is he is messing national problems, -that he creates bringing up unnecesary debates- with the economy.

it may end very badly here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeffrandall/7746806/Whatever-Germany-does-the-euro-as-we-know-it-is-dead.html

 

For Angela Merkel, leader of the eurozone's richest country, a queue is forming of high-quality adversaries. As she tips German Geld und Gut into the furnace of a rescue package for the euro, while going it alone in a misguided ban on market "manipulators", the brass-neck Chancellor has infuriated domestic voters, angered her EU partners (in particular the French) and invited the so-called wolf pack of global traders to do its worst.

 

In one respect, Mrs Merkel is right: "The euro is in danger… if the euro fails, then Europe fails." What she has not yet admitted publicly is that the main cause of the single currency's peril appears beyond her control and therefore her impetuous response to its crisis of confidence is doomed to fail.

 

The euro has many flaws, but its weakest link is Greece, whose fundamental problem is that for years it spent too much, earned too little and plugged the gap by borrowing in order to enjoy a rich man's lifestyle. It flouted EU rules on the limits to budget deficits; its national accounts were a moussaka of minced statistics, topped with a cheesy sauce of jiggery-pokery.

 

By any legitimate measure, Greece was unworthy of eurozone membership. That it achieved card-carrying status was down to the sleight-of-hand skills of its Brussels fixers and the acquiescence of central bank bean-counters. Now we know the truth, jet-hosing it with yet more debt makes no sense. Another dose of funny money will delay but not extinguish the need for austerity.

 

This is why the euro, in its current form, is finished. The game is up for a monetary union that was meant to bolt together work-and-save citizens in northern Europe with the party animals of Club Med. No amount of pit props from Berlin can save the euro Mk I from collapsing under the weight of its structural dysfunctionality. You cannot run indefinitely a single currency with one interest rate for 16 economies, when there are such huge fiscal disparities.

 

What was once deemed unthinkable is now, I believe, inevitable: withdrawal from the eurozone of one or more of its member countries. At the bottom end, Greece and Portugal are favourites to be forced out through weakness. At the top end, proposals are already being floated in the Frankfurt press for a new "hard currency" zone, led by Germany, Austria and the Benelux countries. Either way, rich and poor are heading in opposite directions.

 

When asked on Sky if, in five years' time, the euro will have the same make-up as it does today, Jeremy Stretch, a currency analyst at Rabobank, the Dutch financial services giant, told me: "I think it's pretty unlikely." The euro was a boom-time construct. In the biggest bust for 80 years, it is falling apart.

 

Telegraph loyalists with long memories will be shocked by none of this. In 1996, Sir Martin Jacomb, then chairman of the Prudential, set out with great prescience in two pieces for The Sunday Telegraph why a European single currency, without full political integration, would end in disaster. His prognosis of the ailments that might afflict the eurozone's sickliest constituents reads as if it was penned to sum up today's turmoil.

 

"A country which does not handle its public finances prudently will find its long-term borrowing costs adjusted accordingly," Sir Martin predicted. "Although theory says that default is unlikely, nevertheless, a country that spends too much public money, and allows its wage costs to become uncompetitive, will experience rising unemployment and falling economic activity. The social costs may become impossible to bear."

 

Welcome to the headaches of George Papandreou. The bond markets called his country's bluff. Greece is skint, but its unions don't want to admit it. There is insufficient political will to tackle incompetence and corruption, never mind unaffordable state spending. But, locked into the euro, Greece cannot devalue its way out of trouble, so it relies on the kindness of strangers.

 

Dishing out German largesse to profligate Athens, with little expectation of a reasonable return, is a sure way for Mrs Merkel to join Gordon Brown as a political has-been. Fully aware of the revulsion felt by Mercedes and BMW employees at the prospect of their taxes being used to pay for a Hellenic car crash, she has resorted to creating a bogeyman – The Speculator.

 

By announcing a ban on the activities of short-sellers (those who bet to profit from falling prices in financial markets), she is hoping her decoy will avert German attention from the small print of Berlin's support for Greece, which talks of developing processes for "an orderly state insolvency". This sounds ominously like a softening-up process for a form of default.

 

Greece's severe difficulties were home-made. The euro has come under pressure not from dark forces of speculation but respectable investors, many of them traditional pension funds, which, quite correctly, worked out that when the crunch came, the Brussels elite would sanction an abandonment of its no bail-out rule and cough up for a messy fudge.

 

In 1990, the late Lord Ridley, when still a government minister, caused a storm by telling The Spectator that Europe's planned monetary union was "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe". One knew what he was getting at, but it has not turned out that way.

 

Protecting the euro has become a project via which profligate states dip their fingers in Berlin's till. Germany is taking on nasty obligations without gaining ownership of the assets. Germany's version of The Sun, Bild Zeitung, feeds its readers a regular diet of stories about the way ordinary Germans are being taken for mugs. Trust has turned to suspicion. Next stop is divorce.

 

As for the United Kingdom, we must be grateful that those frightfully clever Europhiles, such as Lord Mandelson and Kenneth Clarke, did not get their way. Had they been able to scrap the pound and embrace the euro this country would be even closer to ruin. Without a flexible currency, the colossal deficit clocked up by Mr Brown would have crushed us completely. We have little to thank him for, but it would be churlish to deny that his decision to reject Tony Blair's blandishments in favour of the euro was a life-saver.

 

Sterling's devaluation has not been pretty, but it is helping to keep our exports competitive while the coalition Government begins rebuilding the nation's finances. Siren voices from across the Channel, calling for closer integration between Britain and the rest of the EU, can be confidently rejected. As for joining the euro, I find it impossible to imagine any circumstances under which it would be in the UK's interest to do so.

 

You're going to be hearing a lot of this type of fear mongering coming from politicians in Europe soon: "If the Euro fails, then Europe will fail!!" and stupidity like that. It isn't true. Money is just a way to measure value. It doesn't matter if it's the Euro, the Dollar, the Yen, or seashells - if someone can print it, it is not safe to use as money.

 

Dumping the Euro would be the smartest thing the people of Europe could do right now.

Germany economically would benefit from dropping the Euro. However they'd lose political power all over the Eurozone if they did that.

 

:laugh3:

 

Aww, ECB, what's wrong? Getting scared of that 1.20 mark?

 

The intervention here is so blatant it's laughable.