Eurocrisis

6 1. Introduction The sustainability of a single currency in the Euro zone has been intensively discussed in the last twenty years and, nowadays, the topic is even more debated. I believe that the question whether the Euro is, or is not, good for Europe is a really challenging and interesting one. There are many different points of view stemming from different interests; in other words, there are people claiming that the introduction of the Euro currency made everything more expensive, and complaining about the fact that there are evident imbalances between Germany and the southern European countries, while, on the other hand, Germans are sick and tired of transferring money to troubled countries, where more fiscal discipline would be needed. Yet another point of view is that held by the entrepreneurs who cheer in the name of a bigger market where trade is easier, and by politicians, who are able to issue public debt at a lower cost, although paying the price of a lower independence. Economists, instead, are divided, with many Americans questioning the sustainability of the single currency and others arguing the Eurozone does not satisfy many of the requirements first presented by Mundell (“A theory of optimum currency areas”, 1961) needed for an optimum currency area; others also claim that the best way of designing a sustainable currency union is to create a fiscal union and federalize public debts in the first place, and than to develop a monetary union, similarly to what the United States did in the eighteenth century with Alexander Hamilton. For example, Feldstein, professor at Harvard and president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, had a very sceptic position about EMU well before its implementation, when he stated: “a European monetary union would be an economic liability. The gains from reduced transaction costs would be small and might, when looked at from the global point of view, be negative. At the same time, EMU would increase cyclical instability, raising the cyclical unemployment rate. Although it is less certain, I believe that the EMU would also make it more difficult to reduce structural unemployment and would increase the risk of protectionist policies toward non-EMU countries”. However, the founding fathers and promoters of the Euro were lead by the conviction that a monetary union would bring along more integration, an increase in intra-European trade and a