Saturday 2 October 2010

The Euro May Not Survive

...according to Joseph Stiglitz, one of the world's leading economists. The Telegraph reports:
The former chief economist of the World Bank and a Nobel prize winner also predicted that short-term speculators in the market could soon start putting pressure on Spain, which is struggling with a large deficit and high unemployment.
And he warns:

... that Spain, similarly to Greece, was now in the speculators' sights. Under the rules of the game, Spain must now cut its spending, which will almost surely increase its unemployment rate still further," he said. "As its economy slows, the improvement in its fiscal position may be minimal.Spain may be entering the kind of death spiral that afflicted Argentina just a decade ago. It was only when Argentina broke its currency peg with the dollar that it started to grow and its deficit came down.

At present, Spain has not been attacked by speculators, but it may be only a matter of time.

And sensibly Mr Stiglitz argues:

... that the different needs of countries with high trade surpluses, particularly Germany, and those running deficits such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece, meant that the single currency was under intense pressure and may not survive. He suggests that one way to save the euro would be for Germany to leave the eurozone, so allowing the currency to devalue and help struggling countries with exports.
Can someone please put this flawed and damaged currency out of its misery asap.

5 comments:

  1. TBF, when I read your blog it is very disconcerting because the left hand edge of the text is just touching the grey stripe on the left of the picture.

    o can you make the pale blue stripe wider or the grey stripe a bit narrower?

    Ta muchly.

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  2. @Mark, sorry I'm not sure what you mean, as the text seems fine.

    Here's a screenshot of how it appears on my home computers

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/54577090@N08/5046375917/

    (I use Firefox.)

    I guess you see something different then?

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  3. @Mark, is this what you see?

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/54577090@N08/5046413807/

    I get this in the Opera browser.

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  4. "Can someone please put this flawed and damaged currency out of its misery asap."

    And please take the EU with it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. TBF, correct, to me it looks like the second one not the first one. Perhaps it's just me. But I do not use Opera browser (do you mean the fat woman from the American talk shows on the telly?)

    What you could do is set up a fun online poll from pollcode.com and ask people whether the left hand edge is chopped off. If it's just me, well then that's my problem not yours.

    ReplyDelete