среда, 16. октобар 2019.

[PDF] Bernard Connolly - The Rotten Heart of Europe (The Dirty War for Europe's Money, 1995)

https://www.amazon.com/Rotten-Heart-Europe-Bernard-Connolly/dp/0571301746

Bernard Connolly was born in Manchester in 1949, and studied at Oxford.
He has worked on Wall Street, and for six years from 1989 was the head of the European Commission responsible for analysis of the European Monetary System and national and Community money policies. On publication of the hardback edition of this book he was suspended from his job and subsequently sacked. He is widely regarded by academics and bankers as the foremost practical expert on the interaction of politics and economics in European monetary affairs.
Citat:
A single currency in Europe would be consistent with integration, economic convergence, with the drawing of full advantage from capital liberalization and with a successful Single Market only if asymmetric real shocks were of minimal importance. For this to happen, the process of levelling-up of productivity and income standards would have had to be completed - for the changes that trigger such levelling-up are themselves asymmetric real shocks. Even that would not be enough: the whole 'economic culture' would have had to become totally uniform across countries, to rule out the possibility of future divergence. The relative sizes of the public and private sectors, the degree of government regulation and subsidy, the role of corporatist institutions versus free markets, the scope and direction of social security systems, the cast of education - all these would first have had to be 'harmonized'. What is more, there would have to be complete certainty that no country in the monetary union could ever move away from this state of conformity in the future. That list of conditions amounts, in effect, to the prior existence of a single government - complete political union. But of course, if all these prior conditions were satisfied, exchange rates would be stable in any case. There would be no need for a single currency - its only benefit would be the elimination of exchange transactions costs. But these are already piffiing (even the Commission itself in 1990 estimated them at less than 0.5% of Community GOP - hardly more than the amount of CAP fraud that is publicly admitted to and a very great deal less than the economic costs of existing Community common policies). And in future, these costs will fall to negligible amounts as financial technology and the 'cashless economy' make further strides. In short, there is no meaningful economic argument for a single currency in Europe - now or ever.13
A currency has meaning because it expresses national monetary sovereignty.14 The circumstances that might make a country want to give up its national monetary sovereignty irrevocably can never have anything rationally to do with economics - though the connection is often falsely made. A reason can be found only in politics or, more accurately, in the desire of certain groups of people to create, extend or buttress power for themselves at the expense of the electorates they are supposed to serve. We shall see many, many examples of this throughout this book.

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