Potential Greek Exit from the Euro
The announcement of a £250,000 prize in a competition to find the best way of organising the exit of one or more states to leave the Euro is very good news for those who believe that the Euro is, and always has been, part of a political project to create a United States of Europe and therefore opposed to Britain’s national interest (see post of August 6th 2011).
The prize is sponsored by the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust. The think-tank “Policy Exchange”, founded by Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, will provide the secretariat for administering the competition and the award of the prize.
The statement accompanying the announcement said that the entries would be judged by “academic economists”. This recalls the Queen’s visit to the London School of Economics on 5th November 2008 when she asked the assembled ranks of academic economists, “Why did no-one see this (the credit crunch) coming?” No answer was the stern reply.
The Queen’s question was answered after a fashion seven months later by a 3-page letter to her, signed by LSE Economics Professor Tim Besley, which blames “a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people” and the “psychology of denial that gripped the financial and economics world in the run-up to the crisis”.
Well, with the possible exception of the over-used world “bright”, we can all share these sentiments. It does however throw doubt on the wisdom of entrusting the prize adjudication exclusively to the very people whose “failure of imagination” led straight to the debt-driven economic crisis of which Greece is only the most prominent national casualty to date.
Those people who believe that the Euro-zone as constituted cannot be managed out of the crisis, may be interested to know that there are 17 issuing authorities for Euro bank notes, one for each participating country. These authorities are identified by a letter in front of a Euro banknote’s serial number. As supplied by a reader these are as follows (in descending order of perceived reliability):
|
Euro Banknotes National Identifiers |
||
| Best | Germany | X |
| ↓ | Holland | P |
| ↓ | Finland | L |
| ↓ | France | U |
| ↓ | Austria | N |
| ↓ | Belgium | Z |
| ↓ | Italy | S |
| ↓ | Spain | V |
| ↓ | Malta | F |
| ↓ | Cyprus | G |
| ↓ | Ireland | T |
| ↓ | Portugal | M |
| Worst | Greece | Y |
What would be the status of Greek Euro banknotes if Greece announced its withdrawal from the Euro-zone? An answer to this question is presumably one of the things the Wolfson prize is looking for. Meantime, risk averse travellers may decide that holding “Y” Euro notes in substantial quantities is a risk worth avoiding.
