pericles said:
This is a interesting article printed in La Nacion from one of the Europe's most respected economist that predicts that Europe and the Euro will fall apart soon . Certainly I would not have Euros now.
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1233945
Where in the article does Daniel Cohen mentions that Europe & Euro will fall apart (soon or not soon) ??!
And as for the PIGS, Daniel Cohen sentiment is that the Greek crisis was provoked by speculators (hedge funds) and the ECB (Jurgen Stark from the ECB announced on january 6 that EU would not save Greece, what was a stupid statement).
For Daniel Cohen, the Eurozone is facing a test, a big one, but only a test.
Daniel Cohen criticizes too, more or less, the fact that the ECB cannot buy State bonds directly (unlike other central banks) and is very critic of the private "notation agencies" (the same ones that were rating subprime products with "A"s) that can put at risk the economy of a country.
My personal thought is that whether we are European, US American, Canadian or British (I separate on purpose a bit the British from the Eurozone), we are being fooled.
The economic crisis might be well from being over (a W shaped one ?).
The whole system looks like the Madoff scam : if you think that's exagarated just realize that a few months ago the subprimes reached the same level as it was before the subprime crisis (20.6% of the loans, credit score of 660).
We live a transition, not like what happened in 1929, but rather like during the 1870s crisis (when France and UK started to lose their dominant position to the US : Nowadays the US are losing their dominant position to newcomers).
If I am right, then we might well be entering a "Kondratiev winter" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave ) meaning that this crisis could last up to 15 years.
As for currencies and the Euro : name only a single safe currency nowadays !
We can easily skip the Euro, the USD, the GBP. Maybe the Norvegian Kron, the Canadian $, the NZ $ and the AUS $ are a bit safer.