Thursday 10 November 2011

Compared to this, Greece was just a sideshow. Italy could blow Europe to pieces

Daily Mail
"Italy is the third-largest economy in the EU, and the eighth largest on the planet. Its outstanding debt of €1.9 trillion (£1.6 trillion) accounts for 25 per cent of all the debt in the eurozone. ....What should the EU do instead? It should oversee the phased unbundling of the single currency.

Supporters of the project insist a euro break-up would be technically unfeasible, but this is nonsense. All the countries in the single currency have recently managed to change their currency: that’s how they joined the euro in the first place.It works just as well when leaving a currency union. I asked a Slovakian economist how his country had managed the transition when it divorced the Czech Republic in 1993.‘Very easily,’ he replied. ‘One Friday, after the markets had closed, the head of our central bank phoned round all the banks and told them that, over the weekend, someone from his office would come round with a stamp to put on all their banknotes, and that, until the new notes and coins came into production, those stamped notes would be Slovakia’s legal tender. On the Monday morning, we had a new currency.’

The protestations that it cannot be done will strike British ears as familiar: it’s precisely what we were told about the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a forerunner of the euro in which a basket of European currencies shadowed the Deutschmark and which Britain joined in 1990."

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