Atilla
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I always believed the primary driver was to prevent Europe facing starvation and century long wars that culminated in the WW2 atrocities. CAP was key.
I would say it started off as a common market and evolved into a political ideal as it worked so well. The free movement of labour, tax harmonisation and common currency were add-ons to achieve this new objective.
If the single currency - is ever corrected and made to work next objective will be a Federal Army. This has already been mentioned and attempted in past few years. Can anyone imagine Germans, French and Brit soldiers fighting alongside each other against some common made up enemy? Or sharing of military equipment ie French aircraft carriers?
Could work I guess - but as strategic risks go it is pretty mammoth recipe for chaos and disaster...
Pat494
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UKIP
UK Independence Party Hillingdon
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Home Contact us :- Our UKIP Policies Dan Hannan comments on Ronald Reagan Nigel Farage tells Mr Barroso “The True “State of the Union” What is the Bilderberg group ? Have your say..IN or OUT of the EU Examples of EU waste
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When the Euro crashes, what then ?
By martinshelvey, on November 20th, 2010
This is from Simon Heffer of the “Telegraph”
I fully concur with his point when he says :- when Angela Merkel recognises the political suicide of spending her electors’ hard-earned money on foreign wastrels – there will be a brief (or perhaps not so brief) economic dark age in the eurozone. We had better plan urgently to trade as much as we can
It would appear that pressure is building up in the EU and when the explosion and the final break comes it will be severe. We cannot sit back and enjoy this forthcoming catastrophe , it will affect us all.
(admin)
——————————————————————————————————————–
Simon Heffer
Euro crisis: Britain needs to prepare for an economic dark age next door
The crisis in the eurozone shows why this country must widen its horizons, writes Simon Heffer.
The Euro might not survive in its present form Photo: PSL Images
By Simon Heffer 8:10PM GMT 16 Nov 2010Comments
On a shimmering day last June, I was talking to one of our most intelligent diplomats about the future of the euro. He told me, matter-of-factly, that there would be a serious crisis again before Christmas, and he suggested that it might not even survive in its present form. He has been proved right about the first point. Whether he is right about the second is anyone’s guess, but if the markets have their way, he will be.
Privately, those who understand the workings of the European Union, but who can manufacture the right amount of detachment about them, admit that the iron façade of common purpose in the European project is starting to creak and rust. For years, a series of pretences has been entered into by dreamers of the European dream about the union’s ability to advance as one entity. It has become worse since the inception of the single currency, of which this country is not, thank heaven, a member.
The club pretends (or sought to pretend: it is now wearing a bit thin) that the great disparities between, say, an economy like Germany’s and one like Ireland’s or Portugal’s could be accommodated within the same common policy; and could be so while individual countries were allowed a measure of economic sovereignty, such as setting their own tax rates. Technically, deficits were to be regulated, but in practice, and in the interests of not upsetting any applecarts, they were not: otherwise, France and Italy would have been booted out long ago. The result is that some countries are now threatening to break the system. And poor old Ireland, with a number of its state-owned banks facing oblivion, cannot even turn its economy around, despite heroic amounts of self-flagellation. But then, if you were trying to have an export-led recovery when your goods were denominated in a currency that is among the most expensive in the world, you would be suffering, too.
There is an old adage that you can’t devalue your way out of an economic problem. Actually, you can. It is called market forces. It is what this country did after being crowbarred out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Our grotesquely overvalued currency plunged by about 30 per cent. Its price on the foreign exchanges reflected exactly what the rest of the world thought it was worth, based on the performance of our struggling economy. Let us not say that the currency was devalued: let us say instead that, allowed to float, it found its own level. We started to export more and we were able to reduce interest rates. By the time Labour took office four and a half years after Black Wednesday, it inherited a rather salubrious prospect.
There will be people in Dublin who wish that option were open to them. The right to devalue – or to have a currency whose value is judged by the market according to the economic policy and performance of Ireland itself – was sacrificed with the decision to enter the eurozone in 1999. Ireland made mistakes. It was awash with money, some of it bribes from the EU for its compliance with the neo-sovietising policy of that institution, much of it the equivalent of a South Sea bubble engaged in by reckless and greedy bankers who were capitalising on low interest rates that reflected a general European economy, not a specific Irish one. Ireland lost a sense of reality and proportion. It has now reached the station exit and spotted the ticket collector: but it can’t find a ticket.
So Ireland faces an ugly decision. Does it, as my colleague Peter Oborne has suggested, leave the euro? Well, it could: but as its debt is denominated largely in euros, the country will struggle to repay it using a greatly devalued currency. It might then have to default on all or some of that debt, which would leave it in an almost Icelandic situation, and with no one wishing to lend it money to keep going. It would be a digital-age equivalent of the potato famine. Everyone who could get out would; those who couldn’t would shoulder a burden of masterminding the recovery that they were ill-equipped to bear.
The price of staying in is a final, and perhaps near-permanent, surrender of what remains of Ireland’s economic sovereignty. The central bank in Frankfurt, funded by increasingly agitated Germans, has covertly been helping out tottering Irish banks. It would now, effectively, have to colonise Ireland. Is that what the centuries-long struggle for independence from Britain was supposed to culminate in? I doubt it. If Ireland is to be bailed out, whether by the ECB or the IMF, it will have to do what it is told. And the ECB, as it eyes Portugal and Spain, and continues to eye Greece, and worries about Italy, will start to think that only complete sovietisation – central control of economies from Frankfurt, with tax rates, deficits and spending run by people who will brook no dissent – can produce a sound, coherent, European economy.
Such a project would simply multiply the strains already apparent in the present system. What is the main issue at most elections fought in most of the 16 member states of the eurozone? It is the economy. But what happens if voting at elections changes nothing about economic policy, because it is already controlled by unelected officials in Frankfurt working in tandem with unelected officials in Brussels? How do the people of any country undergoing economic hardship, because of what they regard as a faulty economic policy, obtain redress? If they cannot do so through the ballot box, what other methods are open to them? Some of you may have thought I was being playful, or provocative, or simply exaggerating, in using a term such as “sovietised”. But I was not, and I hope you now begin to see why.
The best solution for Europe would break the dream altogether: for Germany, the strength of whose economy distorts the value of the euro, to leave the eurozone and re-establish the Deutschmark. This would drive down the value of the euro precipitately, but would make things easier for the ailing economies within it. The Germans would lose nothing: in fact, quite the reverse, as they would have a currency whose strength would be undiluted by unregenerate profligates and spendthrifts in Ireland and in Club Med, and could go around buying up the world with their enormous economic strength. Meanwhile, everyone else could regroup. Any country that felt insulted by this (as I suspect France might) could ask instead to join the Deutschmark zone, if it was mad enough.
Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Commission, predictably said yesterday that if the euro went down, the EU would go down with it. This was all part of the terror tactics against Ireland to accept sovietisation: it was akin to saying “do what you are told”. Doubtless Portugal and Spain will be told the same, and will do the same. How long, though, will the Germans be happy to pay for it?
We, by contrast, should be looking for new markets in America and Asia. When the inevitable happens to Europe – when Angela Merkel recognises the political suicide of spending her electors’ hard-earned money on foreign wastrels – there will be a brief (or perhaps not so brief) economic dark age in the eurozone. We had better plan urgently to trade as much as we can elsewhere.
UK Independence Party Hillingdon
CommentsPosts
Home Contact us :- Our UKIP Policies Dan Hannan comments on Ronald Reagan Nigel Farage tells Mr Barroso “The True “State of the Union” What is the Bilderberg group ? Have your say..IN or OUT of the EU Examples of EU waste
Uncategorized
If it wasn’t so tragic it would be …hilarious »
When the Euro crashes, what then ?
By martinshelvey, on November 20th, 2010
This is from Simon Heffer of the “Telegraph”
I fully concur with his point when he says :- when Angela Merkel recognises the political suicide of spending her electors’ hard-earned money on foreign wastrels – there will be a brief (or perhaps not so brief) economic dark age in the eurozone. We had better plan urgently to trade as much as we can
It would appear that pressure is building up in the EU and when the explosion and the final break comes it will be severe. We cannot sit back and enjoy this forthcoming catastrophe , it will affect us all.
(admin)
——————————————————————————————————————–
Simon Heffer
Euro crisis: Britain needs to prepare for an economic dark age next door
The crisis in the eurozone shows why this country must widen its horizons, writes Simon Heffer.
The Euro might not survive in its present form Photo: PSL Images
By Simon Heffer 8:10PM GMT 16 Nov 2010Comments
On a shimmering day last June, I was talking to one of our most intelligent diplomats about the future of the euro. He told me, matter-of-factly, that there would be a serious crisis again before Christmas, and he suggested that it might not even survive in its present form. He has been proved right about the first point. Whether he is right about the second is anyone’s guess, but if the markets have their way, he will be.
Privately, those who understand the workings of the European Union, but who can manufacture the right amount of detachment about them, admit that the iron façade of common purpose in the European project is starting to creak and rust. For years, a series of pretences has been entered into by dreamers of the European dream about the union’s ability to advance as one entity. It has become worse since the inception of the single currency, of which this country is not, thank heaven, a member.
The club pretends (or sought to pretend: it is now wearing a bit thin) that the great disparities between, say, an economy like Germany’s and one like Ireland’s or Portugal’s could be accommodated within the same common policy; and could be so while individual countries were allowed a measure of economic sovereignty, such as setting their own tax rates. Technically, deficits were to be regulated, but in practice, and in the interests of not upsetting any applecarts, they were not: otherwise, France and Italy would have been booted out long ago. The result is that some countries are now threatening to break the system. And poor old Ireland, with a number of its state-owned banks facing oblivion, cannot even turn its economy around, despite heroic amounts of self-flagellation. But then, if you were trying to have an export-led recovery when your goods were denominated in a currency that is among the most expensive in the world, you would be suffering, too.
There is an old adage that you can’t devalue your way out of an economic problem. Actually, you can. It is called market forces. It is what this country did after being crowbarred out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Our grotesquely overvalued currency plunged by about 30 per cent. Its price on the foreign exchanges reflected exactly what the rest of the world thought it was worth, based on the performance of our struggling economy. Let us not say that the currency was devalued: let us say instead that, allowed to float, it found its own level. We started to export more and we were able to reduce interest rates. By the time Labour took office four and a half years after Black Wednesday, it inherited a rather salubrious prospect.
There will be people in Dublin who wish that option were open to them. The right to devalue – or to have a currency whose value is judged by the market according to the economic policy and performance of Ireland itself – was sacrificed with the decision to enter the eurozone in 1999. Ireland made mistakes. It was awash with money, some of it bribes from the EU for its compliance with the neo-sovietising policy of that institution, much of it the equivalent of a South Sea bubble engaged in by reckless and greedy bankers who were capitalising on low interest rates that reflected a general European economy, not a specific Irish one. Ireland lost a sense of reality and proportion. It has now reached the station exit and spotted the ticket collector: but it can’t find a ticket.
So Ireland faces an ugly decision. Does it, as my colleague Peter Oborne has suggested, leave the euro? Well, it could: but as its debt is denominated largely in euros, the country will struggle to repay it using a greatly devalued currency. It might then have to default on all or some of that debt, which would leave it in an almost Icelandic situation, and with no one wishing to lend it money to keep going. It would be a digital-age equivalent of the potato famine. Everyone who could get out would; those who couldn’t would shoulder a burden of masterminding the recovery that they were ill-equipped to bear.
The price of staying in is a final, and perhaps near-permanent, surrender of what remains of Ireland’s economic sovereignty. The central bank in Frankfurt, funded by increasingly agitated Germans, has covertly been helping out tottering Irish banks. It would now, effectively, have to colonise Ireland. Is that what the centuries-long struggle for independence from Britain was supposed to culminate in? I doubt it. If Ireland is to be bailed out, whether by the ECB or the IMF, it will have to do what it is told. And the ECB, as it eyes Portugal and Spain, and continues to eye Greece, and worries about Italy, will start to think that only complete sovietisation – central control of economies from Frankfurt, with tax rates, deficits and spending run by people who will brook no dissent – can produce a sound, coherent, European economy.
Such a project would simply multiply the strains already apparent in the present system. What is the main issue at most elections fought in most of the 16 member states of the eurozone? It is the economy. But what happens if voting at elections changes nothing about economic policy, because it is already controlled by unelected officials in Frankfurt working in tandem with unelected officials in Brussels? How do the people of any country undergoing economic hardship, because of what they regard as a faulty economic policy, obtain redress? If they cannot do so through the ballot box, what other methods are open to them? Some of you may have thought I was being playful, or provocative, or simply exaggerating, in using a term such as “sovietised”. But I was not, and I hope you now begin to see why.
The best solution for Europe would break the dream altogether: for Germany, the strength of whose economy distorts the value of the euro, to leave the eurozone and re-establish the Deutschmark. This would drive down the value of the euro precipitately, but would make things easier for the ailing economies within it. The Germans would lose nothing: in fact, quite the reverse, as they would have a currency whose strength would be undiluted by unregenerate profligates and spendthrifts in Ireland and in Club Med, and could go around buying up the world with their enormous economic strength. Meanwhile, everyone else could regroup. Any country that felt insulted by this (as I suspect France might) could ask instead to join the Deutschmark zone, if it was mad enough.
Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Commission, predictably said yesterday that if the euro went down, the EU would go down with it. This was all part of the terror tactics against Ireland to accept sovietisation: it was akin to saying “do what you are told”. Doubtless Portugal and Spain will be told the same, and will do the same. How long, though, will the Germans be happy to pay for it?
We, by contrast, should be looking for new markets in America and Asia. When the inevitable happens to Europe – when Angela Merkel recognises the political suicide of spending her electors’ hard-earned money on foreign wastrels – there will be a brief (or perhaps not so brief) economic dark age in the eurozone. We had better plan urgently to trade as much as we can elsewhere.
Atilla
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Some really spooky pooh there... :-0
Let's get down on our knees and pray for European salvation or sovietisation... :cheesy:
I don't think that this the end of the EU. It may take years to get the act together as it is wanted by all members, but it all takes time.
As Paul says, Atilla, the original objective of the six founder nations was to avoid future wars. Therefore, we must not allow EU to fail.
What has happened, afterwards, has been the results of additions and tinkering by politicians, including Americans, who thought that a United Europe would become a powerful ally for them. Everything has happened too quickly before a proper foreign policy has been put together. Who is going to take notice of a nation where Britain does one thing and every other member does another?
As for the currency problem, it was a political issue, without doubt, and shows that European handouts are in the hands of unreliable politicians.
I wanted UK to join the Euro. I was very wrong.
I'm sorry--it was an idealistic idea, not a realistic one at this time.
As Paul says, Atilla, the original objective of the six founder nations was to avoid future wars. Therefore, we must not allow EU to fail.
What has happened, afterwards, has been the results of additions and tinkering by politicians, including Americans, who thought that a United Europe would become a powerful ally for them. Everything has happened too quickly before a proper foreign policy has been put together. Who is going to take notice of a nation where Britain does one thing and every other member does another?
As for the currency problem, it was a political issue, without doubt, and shows that European handouts are in the hands of unreliable politicians.
I wanted UK to join the Euro. I was very wrong.
I'm sorry--it was an idealistic idea, not a realistic one at this time.
Pat494
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Make the most of the sunshine Split ole bean - the party is over. They are sure to push the blame onto someone else too
Atilla
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Yes like a baloon landing a controlled crash in a flexible basket is always better than an unexpected bumpy landing in a brittle inflexible contraption. :idea:
I don't know whether the single currency will survive or not but as it stands it doesn't meet the requirements of the continent in its cultural and economic diversity.
I studied Economic Integration back in the 80s at Reading which had one of only two courses in the country with a great international econ dept. It started off with the European Monetary System which meant countries had to maintain Money Supply and exchange rates within a 3% band. This was the pre-reqs for the alignment of the economies and there were other rules re: budget defecits being no more than 3% of GDP too - if I recall correctly.
In fact against Maggies wishes Chancellor Lawson tried to regulate £terling's value by manipulating interest rates to maintain this 3% EMS band. Just before it all went pear shaped. (Some people to this date do not know or acknowledge this was Gov policy as a matter of fact).
However, no body then considered likes of the PIGS; would behave almost fraudelently in bending rules for political purpose. Politics is a dirty game for bent people with low scruples. I recall back then the Italians and Greeks would claim subsidies for mountain sides where they would plant crop knowing nothing would grow. The Dutch had cows in their back yards claiming money for a farm holding. There was lots of stuff back then too but it was all very small scale. I'm sure we all remember the butter and milk mountains. British farmers were the most efficient as it goes.
I wrote essays for and against - cons and pros etc etc... Must confess I took an objective view and my conclusion back then was that benefits outweigh the costs...
Exchange rates after all was just another extention of a barter economy with uncertainty and just another transaction cost with no benefit. Spanner in the works I reckon as was the politics and excessive idealism before man is ready.
Soft landing with a first aid kit in readiness would re-assure all those on board this flight...
UK may brace it self for the landing and consider we are lucky not to be in the basket.
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Ambrose Ackroyd
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Good God, this bloke is a dead ringer for ET'S dad.
Good God, this bloke is a dead ringer for ET'S dad.
I think this is a typical "job for the boys" individual. I'd rather have Merkel, simply because she is German. Germans symbolise discipline and commonsense in monetary policy. Foreign policy? Germany doesn't want to get mixed up in wars, that must be a good thing.
This guy does not want trouble. He is going to smooth things down.
He's wearing his best diplomatic look on his face. Definitely, a sign that nothing good will come out of what he says.
PS. Let's be realistic.
We've got him!
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Pat494
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He's wearing his best diplomatic look on his face. Definitely, a sign that nothing good will come out of what he says.
PS. Let's be realistic.
Oooooooooh gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawd - he looks like a new born chicken just outa the egg ! Perhaps looks are deceiving :whistling
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Ambrose Ackroyd
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I would tend to agree.
FX Bandit
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I think this is a typical "job for the boys" individual. I'd rather have Merkel, simply because she is German. Germans symbolise discipline and commonsense in monetary policy. Foreign policy? Germany doesn't want to get mixed up in wars, that must be a good thing.
This guy does not want trouble. He is going to smooth things down.
He's wearing his best diplomatic look on his face. Definitely, a sign that nothing good will come out of what he says.
PS. Let's be realistic.
What's all that about? I was just calling him a bell-end.
And Germans don't like getting mixed up in wars?
Granted, they've been quiet recently, but that's just to fool us. Be careful - the Luftwaffe has got a soft spot for Malta, as you probably know.
Pat494
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So the Irish are going to get 85 billion !
Are they ever going to repay it or even get their economy back on track ?
Don't tell the Germans but I doubt it
And it won't be long before they have blown that as well before being back with their hands out for more.
The fatcats won't take a major share of the hit and while they just try and dump the problem on the middle and poor classes they have little hope of a peaceful settlement - same old story really
Their financial rating is equal now to Trinidad - pity about the climate
Are they ever going to repay it or even get their economy back on track ?
Don't tell the Germans but I doubt it
And it won't be long before they have blown that as well before being back with their hands out for more.
The fatcats won't take a major share of the hit and while they just try and dump the problem on the middle and poor classes they have little hope of a peaceful settlement - same old story really
Their financial rating is equal now to Trinidad - pity about the climate
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spinola
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Not sure if you have read my thread but jim corr is attempting to organsie a massive Irish non compliance day march, this sat 27th in Ireland .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ing8xH3Qj-k&feature=player_embedded#!
See if it pops up on sky news or if they "sanitise it fit for public consumption"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ing8xH3Qj-k&feature=player_embedded#!
See if it pops up on sky news or if they "sanitise it fit for public consumption"
Pat494
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Not sure if you have read my thread but jim corr is attempting to organsie a massive Irish non compliance day march, this sat 27th in Ireland .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ing8xH3Qj-k&feature=player_embedded#!
See if it pops up on sky news or if they "sanitise it fit for public consumption"
The protestors should imo change their thrust. Its not much good complaining about individual issues. The protest should try and get the facat politicians to spread the burden fairly. Not just dump it on the poor, unemployed, pensioners and the usual easy targets.
Violence is definately not the solution either.
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