Article: Greece and the Euro: Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

Escaping the Euro
(Image by minority-opinion.com/2012/04/is-there-no-escape-from-euro.html) Details DMCA

The problem is all inside your head she said to me

The answer is easy if you take it logically

I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free

There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.

--Lyrics by Paul Simon

The Euro appears to be a marriage of incompatible partners. A June 1 ^st article in the UK Telegraph titled " Why Europe's Love Affair with the European Project Is Ending " reported that two-thirds of 9,000 respondents thought that having the euro as their single currency was a mistake.

For Greece, it was a tragic mismatch from the beginning; and like many a breakup, it is really about money. Greece is a vivacious young woman chained to a tyrannical old man. She yearns to be free to dance on her own; but breaking up is hard to do. Defaulting on her debts will force her out of the Eurozone and back to issuing drachmas, and she could get brutally beaten by speculators on foreign exchange markets for her insolence.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to an ugly divorce. The treaties binding the 17 member nations are just a set of rules, entered into by mutual agreement; and rules can be bent or broken, especially in crises. The ECB (European Central Bank) broke a litany of rules to save the banks, and so did the Federal Reserve to save Wall Street in 2008. Rules that can be bent for banks can be bent for people and nations--not just Greece, but all the other Eurozone countries threatening to file for divorce.

Paul Simon says there are 50 ways, but here are five creative alternatives.

1. The Open Marriage: Return to Drachma Without Abandoning the Euro

James Skinner, former chairman of NEF (the New Economics Foundation in the UK), suggests that the Greek government could start issuing drachmas without abandoning the euro. Drachmas could be reserved for domestic use--to pay the government's budget, hire workers, build infrastructure and expand social services. He writes:

Greece is suffering from a lack of money because the only source, the single currency, has dried up. But there is no law that states that there has to be only one currency.
. . . By enabling the Government, monitored by the Central Bank, to spend newly created money directly into the economy, bypassing the banking sector, the burden of increasing national debt can be avoided. . . .

This programme for creating a new Greek Drachma, bypassing the private banking sector, could start tomorrow. Its immediate effect would be to get the unemployed back to work. All existing Euro transactions can continue as before, quite separately from the new currency. The two currencies can perfectly well co-exist and run alongside each other. . . . Foreign banks will continue to deal in Euros and other currencies as usual.

This solution was successfully used in Argentina when its currency collapsed in 2001. The government walked away from its debts and started issuing its own Argentine pesos. Three years after a record debt default on more than $100 billion, the country was well on the road to recovery. Exports increased, the currency was stable, investors returned, unemployment diminished and the economy grew by 8 percent for 2 consecutive years.

Next Page 1 | 2 | 3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).