STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Monday, 2 April 2012

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31. Euro Was Flawed at Birth and Should Break Apart Now

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-01/euro-was-flawed-at-birth-and-should-break-apart-now.html

Since the launch of the euro in January 1999, Germany and the Netherlands have experienced a growth slowdown and loss of wealth for their citizens that would not have happened had they never joined the euro.

We know this to be true, because we can compare the progress of these two Northern European economies with that of Sweden and Switzerland, which kept their freely floating currencies in 1999 and continued to grow as before. Indeed, over the period of the euro’s existence, the German and Dutch economies have grown significantly more slowly than those of the U.S. and the U.K., despite the debt crisis now engulfing the “Anglo-Saxons.”

Sweden and Switzerland grew as fast or faster in 2001-11 as they did in 1991-2001. The German and Dutch economies, by contrast, not only slowed down in 2001-2011 (to 1.25 percent from 3 percent in the case of the Netherlands), they also suppressed wage growth to adjust for the effects of the euro. As a result, real consumer-spending growth fell to a feeble one quarter of a percent a year in these countries. A recent report on the Netherlands’ experience in the euro calculated that if growth and consumer spending had followed the pattern of Sweden’s and Switzerland’s in the decade from 2001, Dutch consumers would have been 45 billion euros ($60 billion) a year better off.

Angry, of Course

No wonder the Germans and Dutch are angry. But their anger should be directed at the governments that took them into the euro, not at the hapless citizens of Mediterranean Europe, who now are also suffering the effects of the common currency.