It is roughly three months ago when Wolfgang Schäuble, minister of finance of the Federal Republic of Germany, warned speculators betting against the Euro. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, Schäuble told off anyone who is not favoring the European currency. Those who bet against it will not be successful, he said, and emphasized that the Euro will not fail.
Paper currencies in use throughout the world today hold no value without the underlying political decision to make them the legal tender of commercial activity. They all lose value in the long run. The question for us investors is which loses less fast. Governments in the Eurozone must be willing and capable enough to enforce the currency as a legal form of debt settlement. We are clearly seeing this determination. The Eurozone has a single central bank, the European Central Bank (ECB), and therefore has only one monetary policy, regardless of whether one is located in northern or southern Europe.
When the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971, one consequence was a European panic. Floating currencies raised the inevitability of currency competition among the European states. Almost immediately, the need to limit that competition sharpened, first with currency coordination efforts still concentrating on the U.S. dollar and then from 1979 on with efforts focused on the Deutsche Mark. The result was the European Currency Unit, or ECU, which represented a basket of currencies that were allowed to fluctuate minimally. If the exchange rates went beyond permitted trading bandwidths, governments would intervene.
On January 1, 1999 the ECU system was replaced with today’s Euro, first as an accounting currency, later in 2002 as coins and banknotes.
Nowadays, it is unthinkable to live in a world without the Euro again. It is extremely convenient to travel around the continent and pay in a unified currency within the Eurozone. The history of Continental Europe is a history of stepwise unifications and we came too far and invested too much effort to give up on this mission.
The financial crisis opened our eyes for obvious problems and will initiate further efforts to a stronger and more unified Europe. Speculators may bet against the Euro with their arguments about a troubled Europe. Hoping that the Euro will cease to exist is utopian, though.
The case against currency speculation
Betting for or against currencies is a controversy regularly discussed in the media. Its argument is that speculation that is merely done to exploit arbitrage opportunities have an effect on currency devaluations and ultimately an economic well-being of a nation. Economists, including Milton Friedman, argued that speculations have a positive impact on liquidity and contribute to stabilize markets. The risk-takers perform the important function of providing a market for hedgers and transferring risk from those people who do not wish to bear it.
Gregory J. Millman has an interesting counter-argument to this: According to him, speculators help to “enforce” international agreements and anticipate trends in order to profit. In this view, countries that mishandle their national economies attract speculators who make the inevitable collapse happen sooner. A quick collapse is even preferable to continued economic mishandling. Mahathir Mohamad and other critics of speculation are viewed as trying to deflect the blame from themselves for having caused the unsustainable economic conditions.