Baldrick: “What I want to know, Sir is, before there was a Euro there were lots of different types of money that different people used. And now there’s only one type of money that all the foreign people use. And what I want to know is, how did we get from one state of affairs to the other state of affairs?”
Blackadder: “Baldrick. Do you mean, how did the Euro start?”
Baldrick: “Yes, Sir, if it please you, Sir.”
Blackadder: “Well, you see Balders me lad, way back in the good old 1980s there were many different countries all running their own economies and using different types of money. Oh, the messy, wild fun of it all!
On one side you had the major economies of France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, known to those of us in the know as “the rich bastards”, and on the other, the weaker garlic-munching dago-type nations of Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal, and of course, the Irish, who aren’t dagos but are drunk and feckless.
So one fine day, my little dung heap, they all got together and decided that it would be much easier for everyone if they could all use the same money, have one Central Bank, and belong to one large club where everyone would be happy and laugh all day. This meant that there could never be a situation whereby financial meltdown would lead to social unrest, wars and crises”.
Baldrick: “But this is sort of a crisis, isn’t it Sir?”
Blackadder: “That’s right Baldrick. You see, there was only one slight flaw with the cunning plan”.
Baldrick: “I see, Sir. And what was that then, Sir? Can you explain it in a simple way for someone like me
to understand?”
Blackadder: “Certainly, dear fellow. It was complete and utter bollocks to begin with”.
Well, This Is What I Think 
should have used screencaps from Blackadder Goes Forth.
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Because it’s about conflict in Europe? I think it works anyway 😉
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I agree with Mr Blackadder entirely.
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I am only surprised it took you so long to agree 🙂
You might be surprised to know that as a fervent European integrationist I always thought that the Euro was likely to be a step too far. It was always political stability that attracted me most about the EU – and liberalizing trade barriers – although the raft of EU regulation that came with it was a nonsense – and I understand, of course, that monetary union was intended to contribute to that. But for monetary union to work, everyone has to play by the same economic rules, basically speaking, or the system breaks down.
Greek consumers need to pay taxes, for example. Italy needs to tackle organized corruption. Spain needs to end local Government rorting the system. Ireland needs to make something other than boy bands and winsome virgin brides instead of just consuming EU grants – and so on.
A better idea would have been a loose exchange rate mechanism that allowed currencies to fluctuate within a range according to the success of their local economies. That would have provided useful stability, whilst also encouraging internal competitiveness.
Sadly, commonsense rarely plays any part in partisan political decision-making.
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Reblogged this on StuffEuropeansDo.
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Teehee! Reblogged to http://stuffeuropeansdo.wordpress.com/
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You are dead right about the Euro.
Once again, our Lords and Masters throughout Europe are in a fluster as Germany (correction – the German taxpayer) is forced to hand over €100 Billion to support Spanish banks as the country slides ever closer to bankruptcy and every man, woman and child in Spain is now hocked to a further €2100 debt held in their name by the State – who in turn forced Spanish banks to buy their worthless bonds in the first place. Rumours abound that ten Italian cities can no longer cover their debts and on August 20th, Greece will need to repay the central bank some €3 Billion that it doesn’t have the IMF and the Germans have decided they will no longer stump up just to keep a bunch of melon farmers in the style to which they so rapidly became accustomed after lying their way into the great Euro free money club.
So why are we panicking if a few banks hit the wall? Will we lose our homes, our jobs, our lives?
No, we won’t.
I’d like to remind everyone that most of the planet still functions perfectly well without a bank account. Just 50 years ago, to even own a bank account put you in a professional class beyond the dreams of most of the population. Back then, you borrowed money to buy a house or you waited until your parents died to inherit theirs. An appointment with the bank manager actually meant he wanted to see you and he expected you to remind him why he should even consider you worthy of lending funds deposited by the other customers he possessed, namely depositors. A bank was merely an agent to bring lender and borrower together for a small fee whilst stuffing real gold into a vault in the cellar for safe keeping – not some provider a zillion financial instruments designed to extract every cent you earned.
What do we have now? A carefully crafted system of deceit and entrapment designed to enslave us all to the money lenders. It may astonish readers to know that I survive entirely without a bank account or a credit card. I made the decision to live without credit or “financial facilities” as an experiment to see whether 50 years of High Street banking had made us any richer or wiser. It hasn’t.
Take a look at all the direct debits you pay – a simple system to extract what is owed without recourse to the owner of the account. To pay in cash will now see you punished or shunned – whether it be the State, the Council or any service provider, no bank account access via direct debit and you can’t have the shiny lovely things others may have.
And so it is – we have become enslaved by a slick machine that will hand out money from a machine at midnight in a foreign town, seduced by online banking that eradicates any personal level of service and demands to know your blood group even if you owe not a brass farthing. In cahoots with our Politicians, bankers have enabled themselves and the State to spy and pry upon our personal wealth, to redistribute via taxes or subsidies what we lawfully earned. To live without the chains of a current account is live as a threat to the system it has taken them half a century to implement – the complete abolition of gold or precious things in favour of numbers pumped into a fiat system of money that make pyramid selling look saintly by comparison.
It is my prediction that within the lives of our children, we will see the first true banking state – quite literally, a nation owned and run publically by a banking cartel able to raise taxes via crony politicians, extort funds to cover their gambling losses or satisfy their corporate greed for obscene bonuses. Those who choose not to partake of the banking revolution will be marginalized to the status of unemployable hermits, unable to own property or earn salaries, raise families, travel freely or be represented in any form. My little experiment in shunning the services of the banksters tells me we are well down the road of Corporate fiscal slavery already. Remember, as Goethe so eloquently stated a few centuries ago (shortly before Rothschild stated he cared not for who ruled a country as long as he could ruled their money): “there are none so helplessly enslaved as those who believe they are truly free”. Enter your PIN number, please, it’s time to fight for those who refuse to give up on cash.
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Dickie, did you stop taking those nice pink pills I left with you?
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LOL, I notice you didn’t leave enough wine to wash them down. True though, innit.
People, Europe over, are about to wake up from this Fabian wet dream that is the EEC. And what’s left in the morning after a wet dream? A mess.
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Well you know you and I disagree on the usefulness of the EU. But I do think more economic stormclouds lie on the near horizon, and I suspect monetary union was the most unwieldly and unwise option they could have chosen to lash the economies together and prevent currencies collapsing. And the states which are notable for too low tax takes and too little productivity are in for a prolonged wake up.
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And now we have it.
With the minimum of fuss and very little attention in the media, an unelected central banker just performed a spectacular manoeuvre allowing himself to quite literally raid the earnings and savings of 317 million people in Europe with no further recourse than demanding that by doing so, he will save the Euro as a currency.
A little background perhaps.
Mario Draghi, an ex World Bank and Goldman Sachs Managing Director was appointed by the Council of the European Union (did we ever vote for any of these?) to the second most powerful banking position in the world – head of the European Central Bank. Yesterday, he quietly announced that he would do “whatever it takes” to save the Glorious Euro and in turn, the careers and pensions of a raft of corrupt European Politicians and Bankers. He isn’t joking either. This is a man who can issue bonds, demand funding, control interest rates and lean on the democratically elected leaders of every country in the Eurozone to do as HE says.
Moreover, he can access the tax regimes of any Eurozone state, issue or deny credit. If the Germans or the Finns decide that enough is enough and Greece should receive no further handouts from the hard pressed taxpayers, he can simply roll his Trojan horse through the lot of them and issue credit to the Greeks via the European Central Bank bonds – without any recourse to democracy or European law. He can, in effect, help himself to whatever financial resources he feels he needs and there is no one on the planet that can stop him.
A massive rise in European stocks yesterday showed that Corporate Europe likes the idea of a population of 300 million who will not be allowed to go bust, no matter how badly or corruptly they run their economies. Big business loves the idea of being able to rely on a central bank that will never run out of other people’s money. Hedge funds and speculators have been shown that no matter how big, corrupt or outright incompetent, no European bank will be allowed to fail, the printing of worthless money can continue and in the background, the taxpayer will always be frogmarched to cashpoints all over Europe to pay for it.
Earlier this week, I warned of the creation of a perfect “banking State” whereby an unelected banker could force elected politicians and their electorates to dance for his pleasure or kneel before him in servitude. Guess what? It’s just arrived. Put away your party politics, your banners, your candidates and your political campaigns, the European Central Bank has achieved what 200 years of war could not. Total dominance over the wealth of the people. The European Central Bank has nothing more to do with stability or principles or solidarity of a monetary union designed to serve the people, it is merely a brutal instrument to redistribute your wealth as and when it sees fit and there is nothing you or I can do about it.
Dear Eurozone. You may think you live in a democracy, but every penny you will ever own now belongs to Mario Draghi. Don’t say you weren’t warned
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A very interesting analysis, Richard, and I am not saying you are wrong. But I would be genuinely interested to know what the alternative prescription is? In your view?
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I honestly cannot see one for the people of the EU. We are committed to this Dance of Death.
I would urge anybody in the EU who can leave to do just that.
Depressing, innit?
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So are you envisaging an economic crisis of 1930s proportion, Richard? Widespread depression, huge suffering?
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I would say there is every chance.
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