I wish to state from the outset that I was born and raised in a country that's been part of the European Union from the start. It wasn't even called that back then. When I was around 14 years old, we gave up our old currency and switched to the EURO and that's where the trouble started.
I don't particularly like the European Union, in fact I am now living outside of it and have been for about a year, but what I really, really dislike is the EURO.
There are many issues with the common currency, chief among which is the fact that the European Union Commission and the ECB are in love with this narrative where they act like they're in charge of a nation, when they're not.
This is the biggest flaw - or certainly one of the biggest - of every entity that runs the EU because the European Union is not a country and it will never be one. It is a forum where 27 countries with drastically different interests co-exist.
19 of the 27 countries that compose the EU use the EURO, plus Montenegro and Kosovo that have both unilaterally adopted it and use it as a de-facto currency at a state level.
Leaving these two aside, because they're not part of the EU so what they do doesn't matter from a policy-making perspective, those 19 countries have completely different economies.
The Federal Reserve has many, many, many flaws. But at least when it creates new policies and makes decisions, it does that for one country and one country only and that's the United States. And yes, of course, I'm aware that the 50 countries in the U.S. are also different but it is not the same thing.
Why? Simple. The U.S. is a nation. The European Union is not.
People from California and Texas may dislike each other, and they do, but they share the same nationality, the same passport, the same federal government and institutions, the same anthem, the same national teams and speak vaguely the same language.
People from Italy, Greece, Germany and Ireland (four random examples) have nothing in common apart from the EURO.
The EURO is a failed project. It has been kept on life support pretty much since its inception and it is now falling, almost at parity with the U.S. Dollar, because the ECB and European Commission don't have the power and the vision to make decisions about it. Not even the wrong ones.
Croatia will join the EUROzone on January 1, 2023 and I predict that the same thing that happened to my country will happen to them. You go to sleep and then you wake up and boom, just like that, your purchasing power has gone down. Your salary is the same, but the price of your groceries has doubled.
They can keep their EUROs, I'll gladly keep my crypto and my RSD.
Rant over. Sorry. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
I've crossposted this article on Bitcoinea and LeoFinance.
