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The actual lesson to take here – the euro is a shitty idea

Torsten Bell tells us of some new research:

EU inequality has declined post-financial crisis, but in the euro area inequality has been slightly increasing.

What’s going on? Fast-growing eastern Europe, largely in the EU but not the eurozone, has narrowed the gap with older and richer EU members. But incomes among southern eurozone members such as Greece and Italy have stagnated, falling further behind Germany. The main takeaway? Don’t take economic catch-up by poorer countries of their richer neighbours for granted.

No, that’s not the lesson to take. Rather, if poor folks not in the euro are growing faster than rich folks, and poor folks inside the euro are not, then our conclusion must be that the euro is bad for poor folks.

Or, as everyone but the most committed federast has been pointing out for 30 years now, the euro is a really shitty idea.

4 thoughts on “The actual lesson to take here – the euro is a shitty idea”

  1. The euro has far outlasted the average life span of artificial currency unions, which stood at 13 years previously. Surely it’s now time to declare it a triumph and go back to the old currencies.

  2. While not a fan of the NeuDeutschMark euro, I think there’s a couple other things going on there that would have happened anyway if we’d have had adapted any other currency as a base.

    Starting with a hella lot of people from non-eurozone-but-in-EU countries ( the old commie states) working in the eurozone and Sending Money Home. Makes life cheap… And tends to distort things in many, many ways… Can’t blame them either..

    And really.. Greece and Italy.. (and partially France and Spain).. You mean the countries that keep on spending money they haven’t got and are gridlocked by “Unions” and *ahem* “historic popular cartels”?

  3. “A fifth of EU-wide income disparity is down to differences between countries with those in the Euro-area faring worst”

    So the formerly rich countries : Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, tax-haven-embourg, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece are now actually poorer than the non-Euro countries in the EU like Sweden, Poland …

    Or is it that the Grauniad sub-editors don’t understand what they are talking about?

  4. New research? Carried out when, during the shut-down of economies World-wide? Likely to be valid then.

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