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THE EURO - Media Comments and Reaction News & Commentary in German |
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Reviews in English Past, present and future of the euro A review of a book on the euro that deals with everything from the history of the monetary union to the challenges that lie ahead By Stewart Fleming - published on 19/03/09 in European Voice David Marsh was a journalist at the Financial Times who made his name in the 1980s by gently poking fun at the Bundesbank (then a new experience for that august institution), so it is no surprise that his book, The euro, is entirely readable. Uncovering hitherto untapped archival material, he adds to our understanding of the events that led up to the launch of the single currency, particularly the relationship between France and Germany and the roles played by some of the participants. He provides, for example, a gripping account of aspects of the 1992 Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, with quotations from unpublished documents, including a ferocious confrontation between the then Bundesbank president Helmut Schlesinger and Jean-Claude Trichet, the current ECB president and at that time director of the French treasury. In looking forward, however, Marsh opts too readily to back the conventional wisdom of today. The forecast that the ECB will “downgrade” its monetary pillar just at a time when the “inflation-targeting” monetary policy strategy followed elsewhere (including de facto in the US) has visibly failed, looks improbable. As for his conviction that the ECB will hand over to the Eurogroup the responsibility for defining ‘price-stability', the hard-currency denizens of Château Frankfurt would rather rot in hell than surrender the bulwarks of their independence. They and the Eurogroup finance ministers who would support them need only to look at the hapless Bank of England to know that they should retain control of more than just the instruments of monetary policy implementation. Stewart Fleming is a freelance journalist based in London. For further details including book purchases, bulk copies and news on book launch events, please contact: Wiebke Räber, London and Oxford Group, + 44 (0)20 7796 9911, wiebke.raeber@londonandoxford.com For all other questions about the book, including reviews, please contact: For English edition: Katie Harris, Yale University Press, + 44 (0)20 7079 4900, katie.harris@yaleup.co.uk For German edition: Dagmar Landgrebe, Murmann Verlag, +49 (0)40 3980 8313, landgrebe@murmann-verlag.de
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