Euro woes

Published on 08/10/2012 00:00

John Brand (Letters, 6 October) asserts that German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president François Hollande “will do all in their power to keep Greece within the euro”. Presumably, that includes continuing to damage and possibly ruin the economies of the European Union and other countries and unload further debt on future generations.

“Both countries need the euro to survive intact”, he states. This is not so, whether he means they need the euro’s survival per se or need it to ensure their own county’s survival. They, Europe and the world survived until 2000 without such an ill-thought out and uncontrolled experiment. The euro’s demise would be difficult, but perhaps not quite so disastrous as the continuing drip-drip non-
solutions of the past three years, nor so unwelcome as a German-dominated EU.

The worst financial crisis in a century was no doubt rooted in the “greed of unregulated financiers”, but that is a totally different problem from the euro. Does he really believe that without the global banking shambles, the eurozone’s inherent contradictions would never have materialised?

These chickens were bound to come home to roost and as the euro “cart” was put before its members’ fudged economic convergence “horse”, it is hardly surprising that it has come unstuck.

John Birkett

Horseleys Park

St Andrews, Fife