ABSTRACT
In early 1996, when I wrote this diatribe against the euro, it was very much in the spirit of North American thinking at the time-at least among many prominent economists. Martin Feldstein had made a similar argument in The Economist magazine, and Milton Friedman famously remarked that he knew of no respectable economist ‘in the world’ who was prepared to defend the euro project on economic grounds. Feldstein even argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs, that bastion of American establishment thinking, that the euro might so exacerbate wrangling within Europe as to trigger World War III, exactly the opposite of what its political promoters intended.
