Euro? Nogo

I slept with the windows in the bedroom open last night and was awoken by a torrential downpour at one stage; and by overheating at another so I can't really be bothered today. It's annoying as well because it means I slept and will sleep on the train and therefore cannot eye-up the current train fitty.

Anyhow, as I'm not in a witty mood, there shall be a departure into Eurozone politics.

At university I had to do EU law. We had a seminarist called Catherine Phoeng who was raised (if not also born) in France. She was an ardent Europhile. Not just ardent in fact, but so Europhillic that she just could not comprehend a Eurosceptic point of view. We did not get on. We had many heated debates, icluding one huge, blazing row about the British three-pin-plug. I saw it as a very safe, sensible design; she saw it as a barrier to integration. She also ignored the fact that it helped create jobs in manufacture (particularly of travel adapters). It amused my fellow seminarists greatly.

It was around the same time as the single European currency was coming into effect - trading was due to start, though the actual money was not to be distributed for a few years. I was hugely sceptical about it. Catherine could only see benefits - the reduction in problems with exchanges; breaking down barriers; reduced costs and a central European bank. It was this latter that particularly concerned me. I said that the salt-water test would come after around ten or fifteen years when the initial euphoria had calmed down - we would see whether the currency worked for trade; as an investment; and for stability.

PIGS

Portugal; Italy and Ireland; Greece and Spain. All dragging the Euro into a massive crisis. The major problems? Well, there are many. We will start with the industries:
Germany has a heavy industrial and manufacturing sector. The PIGS are hugely dependent on tourism. France, obviously, doesn't have an industry, they just go on strike. Yes manufacturing has contracted in the global economic slowdown, but nowhere near to the extent that tourism or fishing have. The PIGS have simply haemorrhaged money - people are not going to their countries, introducing wealth to their countries and yet they are still spending and borrowing.
Britain's economy is safer from this because we have a heavily service-based economy.

Then there is the banking. Even though all of these countries share the same currency; they have their own budgets. Germany has always been somewhat prudent; whereas Greece has not. As such, the Grecian borrowing sprialled out on control on the basis that they always thought they could pay it back.

And then there are the interest rates. Or rather rate. A single rate. Despite the fact that so many of the countries in the Eurozone has such vastly different industry bases; such hugely different economies; and such astonishingly different spending and borrowing policies; there is a single interest rate. Germany and France are somewhat concerned about inflation at the moment. As such, the interest rate for the Eurozone has increased slightly. But this has increased the cost of borrowing for the PIGS.

The scale of the Eurozone is simply incomprehensible and entirely incompatible with a single currency. And, although I am not an economist, I cannot see it as sustainable.

I did see with a wry smile a German commentator suggest that Germany should take control of the Euro. To what degree, one has to wonder? Are they to take control of all of the individual sovereign banks as well? Each individual country's economic policy? As an Englishman, perhaps I should not make comment.

I know this is a very simplified view, but I smile.

And not just as a Eurosceptic; but because ten years ago I was right.