The need for a common currency. Gold

The Euro Crackup

By Jeffrey Tucker |

Watching the euro melt has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You knew it was coming. You know which cars on the train are next line to be mashed. There is nothing you can do to stop it. You can only watch as it happens, with one car after another compressing like a tin can, and all you can do is say, “I told you so,” the entire time.

The whole European currency scheme was both brilliant and crazy. It was brilliant because Europe should have a united currency. In fact, the whole world should have a united currency. Once upon a time, it did. It was called the gold standard. National currencies were just another name for the same core thing — a nationalist spin on a global consensus. If some country had waved around an unbacked piece of paper and called it money, no one would have taken it seriously.

And the gold standard was internally policing. If one country debauched the currency, gold would flow out, the thing would lose credibility and capital would flee to places that took sound finance seriously. Governments were restrained, the hands of politicians were tied (they could only spend what they could overtly steal) and markets ruled the day. The politicians hated it, but markets were free, stable and growing.

So yes, there is a case for single currencies in regions, or even the entire world. Truly, why should people and multinational commercial institutions have to go through the ridiculous headache of changing currencies at the border? This is just pointless. Imagine if an inch meant something different in every country, and you had to come to a new understanding of its meaning in order to build on this, versus on that side of the border? Markets don’t like this kind of pointless exercise. The natural market tendency is toward unity in what matters (money) and disunity where it matters (competition and entrepreneurship).

So the European elites who cobbled together the euro after many decades of planning played to that sense, and developed a reasonable expectation of a wonderful Europe united with peace and free trade, all with a single currency. It seemed like a recreation of an older, freer, more-wonderful world. So why not?

Here’s why not: The gold standard no longer exists. It hasn’t existed since the politicians destroyed the last remnants of it in the early 1970s. And it was in 1970 that the idea of a single currency for Europe went from the dream stage to the planning stage. At the end of the gold standard, the idea should have been dropped, but it was not. The planning elites had it in their heads that this was the only way forward, and nothing would stop them.

A single currency seemed like a great idea to the relatively weak economies of Europe. The lira, peseta, escudo, franc and drachma would no longer suffer at the hands of traders who seemed to forever cling to the German mark. They could inflate without consequence. Knowing this to be a problem, the pro-euro planners cobbled together certain safeguards. There would be a single central bank, and sovereign countries would have to give up autonomous control over monetary policy. The same would apply to national finance: no more endless running of deficits, and no more free-spending legislatures.

As a condition of entering the currency union, countries would have to agree to all these terms and more, including harmonized regulatory systems. Governments would have to confess their prior sins and swear on a holy copy of the EU Constitution that they would be good from now on. Well, that didn’t happen, but the planners were so dead set on the notion of a single currency that they decided to look the other way. All these entered the union with debt and broken banking systems, all in a sort of collective hope that the whole could cover the sins of the parts.

Sure enough, the southern countries experienced a wonderful boon following the introduction of the euro. Interest rates on government bonds fell dramatically — not because their citizens were suddenly saving, and the banks were flush with capital. The reason was the new perception that the European Central Bank would operate as a guarantor of the debt of all eurozone countries. In other words, rates fell in Europe for the same reason they fell in the United States: The centralization was creating a moral hazard.

This set off a lovely economic boom that later led to bust, there just as here. The central bank, however, had already promised that it would not be involved in any bailout schemes, that it would only fight inflation. This was a strange repeat of history because this is precisely what the Fed had claimed when it was created too. Central banks always say this at the outset: We will sleep with the money, but we won’t actually do anything. We will resist every temptation!

The problems here are incredibly obvious. Countries had not actually given up all their fiscal authority. Most importantly, their banking systems still had control and, thanks to fractional reserve banking, they still could create money, and in a way that the central bank could not control. This too is a consequence of not being on a gold standard that automatically regulates and restrains the banking systems.

Now, each national banking system, and even each bank, ran its own discretionary policy, with the implicit (but never stated) guarantee from the central bank that it would never let the system fail. Worse, every country in Europe had to accept this money.

Economist Philipp Bagus of Juan Carlos in Madrid observes that the whole system embedded a kind of monetary imperialism from unsound economies to sound economies, dragging down economic structure and poisoning the whole system with the viruses of the worst states. If this story sounds familiar to Americans, it should. This is the same problem that gave rise to the crazy real estate boom in the U.S. and the subsequent meltdown. It’s our old friend Mr. Moral Hazard, but operating across the entire eurozone.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the economist who predicted this whole scenario in the early 1990s, observes that this centralization is the inevitable path of paper money regimes, as governments constantly seek higher and higher authorities to expiate their sins. With each step, the money gets qualitatively worse and the imposition of economic controls becomes ever more tyrannical.

What is the way out? Everyone is now talking about the restoration of national currencies, and while that is a better approach than standing by as the entire system collapses and the contagion spreads around the world, it is not as easy as it seems. Every country that wants to reassert its national currency will have to give up its debt addictions and clean up its fiscal house. The banking system will have to be deleveraged. Industries sustained by the euro subsidy will have to go belly up.

If this fantasy actually became true, it would be entirely possible for any one country (hint: Germany) to adopt an authentic gold standard, perhaps inspiring others to do the same. The end result — we are talking about a decade-long process here — could, in fact, be another single European currency, a sound currency rooted in reality and not the hallucinations of politicians and financial elites.

How much tolerance is there in the world today for such pain? You need only look at the U.S. situation to get an idea. The technocrats in charge today are completely unlike those of yesteryear. They will not permit wholesale deleveraging. They believe that they have the tools to prevent all pain, and the political systems of the world are structured to punish anyone who thinks about long-term gains over short-term pain. If you doubt that, take off an evening and watch the Republican presidential debates.