Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Euro will survive but it could be very different from its current state

We don’t know how the world will look in five or ten years´ time but I would say that I believe the euro will survive. Now the question is, in what form? Maybe there will be a euro like a US dollar, we have a US dollar, and maybe some countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain will no longer use the euro and will have essentially gone back to their local currencies. It could be, maybe not. Because you understand, the typical Italian, Spaniard and Greek, he knows very well: we leave the EU, our pensions will be paid in local currency and that will be much less than what we get now.

So on the one hand, from a nationalistic point of view, most Europeans would like to leave the EU but when they look at their pocket book, it is like when Scotland, when the vote came up to exit Britain, Great Britain, the young people, most of them voted for the exit, but the elderly people, the pensioners, they were threatened, again because as you say the media said well you leave the EU, your pensions will be cut... so if you are an elderly pensioner, what do you prefer, to get your pension and be part of the UK or leave the UK and get lower payments?

This is one reason I think the EU may stay together but of course if the economic conditions in the southern countries, Greece, Italy, Spain... do not improve, if they actually worsen again then maybe the move towards leaving the EU will become very strong. Number two, I have been writing about this, you know if you look at history, we had great empires, the Greek empire and the Roman empire and the Ottomans and the Spanish empire and the British empire and now we have the supremacy of America that I probably waning but it was certainly there after the Second World War, the point is usually if you had empires in the past, it was very costly because you had to keep armies in the so called colonies in your territories, and if there were problems you would have to send in the troops and the ships and so forth to essentially enforce your empire.

In the modern empires, like the EU, you may have to pay. It is not sending armies to Greece but basically you have to pay so that Greece stays in the empire and then comes the questions the Germans ask, how long are they going to be willing to pay for it? Because it comes out of tax payers´ money, you understand, the politicians, they don’t pay it. Most politicians don’t even pay taxes because they are with the EU in Brussels or with the IMF or the OECD, all these clowns they don’t pay tax and then they go and propose wealth taxes on the others, on us, who work. They don’t work, they don’t pay tax but the others should pay tax.

Basically the tax payer in Germany one day he will say well we don’t like the policies of Mrs Merkel and this is happening in America, they don’t particularly like Donald Trump but they like the fact that he points the finger at all these others that have abused the system so badly. My sense is that we could have not necessarily revolutions in the sense that you have armies fighting against each other in Germany and France like in the French revolution and so forth but what we could have is through the democratic process people saying we are just fed up with these bureaucrats in Brussels and the ones in Berlin and the policies that always lean on America. We are sovereign nations; we want to be free, even if it costs us something.

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