外刊9-15.docVIP

屠屠带你啃外刊(9) 第一遍 We start with the most basic question of all: can one or more countries leave (or be forced out of) the euro, both legally and practically? As a matter of legal principle, the answer is no, because when countries joined the euro the conversion of their former currencies was supposed to be “irrevocable”: a Hotel California that you can never leave. Indeed, a legal opinion published by the ECB in 2009 argued that because European treaties did not conceive of the possibility of a country leaving the euro, an exit would require them to leave the European Union (EU) as well. That would exaggerate the economic pain because the departing state would lose access to both the single market and valuable regional-support funds. But we think this argument of legal impossibility is overstated. European laws are in constant change because of the ease with which new agreements can supersede old ones. The Maastricht treaty of 1992 banned bail-outs, but you have yourself authorized two agreements allowing them: the temporary rescue fund and the permanent European Stability Mechanism, whose legality our constitutional court is considering at the moment. Similarly, we think that it will be possible to find a way round the supposedly binding rule that a country exiting the euro would also have to leave the EU. What about the practical obstacles to an exit? There are two main ones. First, it would take several months to design, print and distribute an entirely new currency, leaving a departing country bereft of new cash. Second, news of a country leaving or being ejected would almost certainly leak, prompting bank runs so massive that they would overwhelm even the ECB’s ability to counter them. That would lead to a total (and chaotic) break-up rather than a controlled one. We think it will be possible to deal with both these practical difficulties. Yes, it took six months to launch a new currency when, for example, the Czech-Slovak monetary union broke up in 1993. And yes