by Chris Becker
The union currency experiment – where over 20 sovereign states gave up their ability to enact independent monetary policy in exchange for a single currency is, at face value (sic), a successful attempt at bringing together disparate economies to maximise efficiency. Sound Germanic? Well it should, because its basically a devalued Mark, allowing the mercantile economy to export more goods including financial products at a cheaper price.
Up until 2008 the experiment worked, bringing together over 300 million people after centuries of using disparate and volatile domestic currencies. The GFC changed all that with a rolling succession of sovereign debt crises, unable to be solved due to the abdication of monetary and effectively fiscal policy solutions that were once available to a sovereign currency issuer.