I'd love it if the Euro was scrapped and substituted with some form of honest money. Obviously this isn't going to happen any time soon because it would imply many banks going tits up, which they will try to avoid at any cost, at massive expense for their citizens.
It was a bad idea to begin with. The EEE was just fine, no need for the EU. Definitely not like this.
I think the question is how long they can continue to defy economic reality.
Ironically the best investment I've made all year will probably end up being a £150 bet I made in January that Greece would exit the euro this year.
The Athens composite index (ATHEX) is now just a few points from being down
90% since 2007.
Capital is leaving greek banks at a rate rumored to be up to 4 billion euros per week (>1% of GDP
per week).
They have a youth unemployment rate now approaching 60%, general unemployment approaching 25% and no government for the next month at least.
So they're fucked. What about the others?
Well, the other Eurozone governments are exposed to greek government debt directly to the tune of about 200 billion.
Most of this one way or another ends up being guaranteed by the Bundesbank, who are now owed >600 billion euros by other central banks, who of course have it out on loan to all those failing Spanish and Greek banks, who are actually so bust that Reuters was reporting yesterday that the ECB had stopped supporting them (temporarily, until they realised that said banks would be hours from collapse if they didn't deny it) because their capital base was so depleted that they no longer had enough assets to cover their liabilities and were therefore trading whilst insolvent.
If the Euro fails, and it will, it's a matter of when, not if, then the Bundesbank will suddenly have a stock of loans that are no longer payable in euros, but payable in currencies almost certainly substantially weaker than Germany's own. If they make it out only suffering a 200 billion euro trading loss I'll be very impressed.
I'd bring up the situation in Spain, in Italy, and even further afield outside the EU where Japan has >$5 Trillion in debt that it has not a hope of ever being able to pay back, but frankly that's just way too depressing.~
It's going to be a very interesting couple of years.
Me? I'm just going to go out and spend some of my money, because frankly the way things are going we're heading for a collapse the like of which has never been seen before, and I doubt my paper money will be worth anything when we're done.