The Euro (how A Common Currency Threatens The Future Of Europe)

By (author) Stiglitz Joseph E.
Short description/annotation
The Nobel Prize–winning economist and best-selling author explains why saving Europe may mean abandoning the euro.
Description
When Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz posed this question in the original edition of The Euro, he lent much-needed clarity to a global debate that continues to this day. The euro was supposed to unify Europe and promote prosperity; in fact, it has done just the opposite. To save the European project, the euro may have to be abandoned. Since 2010, many of the 19 countries of Europe that share the euro currency—the eurozone—have been rocked by debt crises and mired in lasting stagnation, and the divergence between stronger and weaker economies has accelerated. In The Euro, Joseph E. Stiglitz explains precisely why the eurozone has performed so poorly, so different from the expectations at its launch: at the core of the failure is the structure of the eurozone itself, the rules by which it is governed. Stiglitz reveals three potential paths forward: drastic structural reforms, not of the individual countries, but of the eurozone; a well-managed dissolution of the euro; or a bold new system dubbed the “flexible euro.” With trenchant analysis—and brand new material on Brexit—The Euro is urgent and timely reading.
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"Terrific and clarifying."
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"[Stiglitz] is surely right. Without a radical overhaul of its workings, the euro seems all but certain to fail."
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"Many of Mr. Stiglitz’s most damning observations are on target."
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"Stiglitz lucidly and forcefully argues that [the euro] was an economic experiment of unprecedented magnitude.… [He] gives a detailed and persuasive list of measures that would help save the euro."
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"Stiglitz’s verdict is convincing.… We should brace ourselves, over the next few years, for what may be a difficult economic divorce."
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"Much more than a demolition job. These chapters are full of constructive proposals—a glimpse of what the ‘rescues’ would have looked like had the troika, perish the thought, hired their critic Stiglitz to design them."
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"Cogent.… Stiglitz’s prescription is compelling."
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"The euro is a modern tragedy.…As its embarrassments have mounted, its supporters club has teemed with political romantics and Europhile journalists. Stiglitz’s message to such people is that they are inadvertently destroying what they most cherish."
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"Stiglitz seeks to salvage the Eurozone experiment and the future of globalized Europe. And not a moment too soon!"
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"Stiglitz argues with his customary force and lucidity that adopting a single European currency was a fatal error."
Biographical note
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize–winning economist and the best-selling author of Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti- Globalization in the Age of Trump, The Price of Inequality, and Freefall. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, chief economist of the World Bank, named by Time as one of the 100 most influential individuals in the world, and now teaches at Columbia University and is chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute.