by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, www.nofica.com

It takes only two things to keep people in chains:The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders.

In a May, 2010 talk at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, I said:

Because of the Euro, no euro nation can control its own money supply. The Euro is the worst economic idea since the recession-era, Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The economies of European nations are doomed by the euro.”

My reason was something that should have been obvious to anyone with even a smattering of knowledge about economics. Every euro nation was forced to surrender the single most valuable asset any nation can have: It’s Monetary Sovereignty.

A Monetarily Sovereign (MS) government has complete control over its own sovereign money. An MS government can control the supply and the value of its money. It can pay any debt denominated in its sovereign currency. It can create its sovereign currency at will, simply by paying bills.

An MS government never can run short of its sovereign currency, never can be “burdened” by debt, never can find debt “unsustainable,” and never needs to ask anyone (taxpayers or lenders) for infusions of its sovereign currency.

The U.S. government, for instance, has absolute power over the dollar, which gives lie to all the debt “Henny Penny’s” who for at least 77 years, have claimed the federal deficit and debt are in some vague way a threat to the government or to American taxpayers.

So it was with guilty but pleasurable feelings of “I told you so,” that once again I publish excerpts from an article that appeared in the Naked Capitalism blog:

Why Does the Euro Area Have Such Low Growth and High Unemployment?

Posted on November 11, 2017 by Yves Smith

By Philip Arestis, Professor of Economics at the University of the Basque Country, Spain and Malcolm Sawyer, Professor of Economics, University of Leeds. Originally published at Triple Crisis

Since the euro was adopted as a virtual currency in 1999 (and the exchange rates between the currencies of the then 11 countries fixed en route to adopting the euro), growth among the euro-area countries has been lacklustre.

The euro-area annual growth rate was just under 2% in 2002 to 2007, followed by 0.3% in 2008, -4.5% in 2009, then 2% in 2010, and an average of 0.8% 2011 to 2016. Over the period 1999 to 2016, the average was 1.1%.

Unemployment declined through to 2007 down to 7.5%, then rose in the aftermath of the financial crises and the effects of fiscal austerityprogrammes to 12% in 2013, and has gently declined since to 10% in 2016 and likely to come close to 9% at the end of October 2017.

There are notable disparities between different countries’ experiences, with Italy’s growth 1998 to 2016 being an annual average rate of 0.2%, and unemployment in Greece over 23% and Spain close to 20% in 2016.