xyz123

Patrick..

Why do you call the dollar coin silly? Study after study has shown the American treasury could save millions by doing what every other country has done i.e. doing away with a bank note worth as little (sorry folks but it's true) as a dollar. Britain no longer has a £1 bank note, the smallest paper money is £5. Euroland never had a €1 bank note; the smallest paper money is worth €5; Canada no longer has a $1 or $2 bank note, they have the looney and the twoney.

I do agree that I do like the £1 coin; it is nice and thick. My colour vision is not as good as it once was and I still have some problems distinguishing €.50 coins from €1 coins; I do wish the €1 coin was domewhat thicker, I really can't feel much of a difference by feel as I can with English coins (certainly you know you are holding a 50p coin by its very shape).

Personally, and I am not a Brit so it's based on talking to people who may not represent the majority, my friends in Britain tell me they are utterly opposed to the Euro as they can't picture having to submit to German and French theories on interest rates and taxation; an independence they will be forced to give up if Britain adopts the Euro. Also, I don't think they would know what to do if they didn't have the picture of the Queen on their money....

Lovejoy

Mucky,according to Gordon Brown,the earliest date for a referendum on the UK joining the Euro would be 2005.But this is just talk to keep the boys in "The City" happy. Realistically the time frame is more like 2006-08.

Patrick

Why do I call the $1 coin silly? You try putting 19 of them in your pocket and then walking a few blocks. Maybe it's different if you carry a purse. I don't. By the way, I think the silliest thing the "euro people" did was to have both a 1 cent and a 2 cent coin. I think what we should really give up in the US is the penny, and the euro and the dollar should have started with a 5 cent coin in my opinion.

xyz123

It's not the coin that's silly, it's the way the machine made change.

You would probably feel somewhat the same way if you had gone to the clerk, spent 37 cents for a stamp and been given 19 $1 banknotes.

rkkwan

The Europeans should really have adopted the US way of coinage. Just 4 coins. I found it totally ridiculous to find 8 different types there: 1, 2, 5 cents; 10, 20, 50 cents, and then 1 & 2 euro. Or at least do what the Canadians do. Still only just 6 types. [Only thing that can be confusing with US/Canadian coins is that the nickel is larger than the dime.]

BTW, some places are actually moving back from coins to paper money, like the Hong Kong $10. The coins (which look like a 1 euro, with its two metal construction) are often counterfeited. Merchants in neighboring Macau has stopped accepting those coins, and local legislators are thinking about phasing them out, in favor of the new HK$10 note.

xyz123

Sterling comes in the same exact denominations as do Euro coins (1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1, £2/ I could live with this (actually who am I to say I could live with this!) and I don't know if it's just me with my problems with colour perception but I still think both the €1 and €2 are not thick enough to be more easily recognizable by feel from coins of lower denominations....the UK solved the problem by making the 20p coin not quite round (as I remember) and I know the 50p coin is not round.

Incidentally, given the existance of modern copiers, isn't it easier to counterfeit bank notes than it is to counterfeit coins? Just asking.

ira

If the US called in all of the current money and reissued new currency and coins at the rate of 1 for 10 it would,

Make the dollar worth something closer to a dollar,

Make pennies worthwhile

Flush out all of the hidden ill gotten gains.

People would stop complaining that the euro was up to $1.22. It would be only 12 cents.

Patrick

Author: xyz123
Date: 03/22/2004, 02:35 am
Message: It's not the coin that's silly, it's the way the machine made change.

You would probably feel somewhat the same way if you had gone to the clerk, spent 37 cents for a stamp and been given 19 $1 banknotes.
* * * * *

No, xyz. I wouldn't feel at all the same way. I don't carry a purse. I can easily tuck 19 $1 notes into my wallet and know I can spend them easily in the next few days. But do you have any idea what it's like to drop 19 $1 coins into your pocket? It is incredibly heavy. I'm not kidding when I said I walked home with a limp!

sheila

Dear Mucky.

My answer is still the same

flanneruk

Sheila:

Back in 2001 - when it was still possible to argue that the Euro might, one day, benefit the unfortunate Continentals who were lumbered with the insanity - your answer was "the sooner the better"

Three years on, as the Eurozone remains stuck in the mire, and as the UK is in its twelfth successive year of continuous economic growth (a record matched only by Australia, which has also avoided sharing a currency with its neighbours), the question has to be: "Better for whom?"

Obviously not for Brits. Obviously not for the people in the Eurozone (for whom the UK is practically the only place to which their exports are growing). Certainly not for the people of the 10 new EU accession countries, for whom only the UK and Ireland are now open as potential sources of employment.

Presumably, you mean "better for Americans and Japanese". Because I can think of no-one else who could possibly benefit from our joining the world's most successful economy-destroying initiative.

david_west

I was vehemently against it then, and if anything my attitude has hardened.

In common with most of my fellow Brits I have now seen the upside of the euro, on holidays in Europe it certainly is a convenience crossing borders.

Also the currency is proving rather more robust that I initially thought. (Although a lot of this is to do with the Dollar being beaten like a ginger step-child on the money markets)

Having said that....

I still don't want any part of it.

There are a variety of reasons for this. All of my original objections around sovereignty and political union still stand, and there is now an emotional element that didn't exist before.

That is that this country really isn't all that "European", as demonstrated over the Iraq war and subsequent events, culminating in the recent Spanish Elections.

There is an obvious split between ourselves and the French-German axis around an awful lot of our worldview. The Spanish also appear to share this view.

Until this rift is healed I do not think we can look at closer political and economic union.

Also at a purely practical level, the introduction of the Euro doesn't seem to have disadvantaged us in any meaningful way.

Tony Blair also seems to have come to realise that there is no political advantage to be gained from entering the Euro, in fact the opposite does seem to be true.

I'd be suprised if it was an issue in the next election.

keith_l

Mine's still the same - I don't see why we shouldn't join. I think the romantic notion of sovereignty and the currency is simply rubbish - Scotland hasn't lost its own identity just because it has shared currency with England for the last 300 years or so. What I think is interesting is the distinct possibility that in a referendum Scotland and Northern Ireland might vote for the Euro - and convincingly so - and England and Wales vote against so the UK doesn't go in. That's more likely in my opinion to provoke a rise in nationalism than anything else.

Mucky

Having considered the overall Euro situation I think that if there was a referendum tomorrow,UK people generally would vote NO by a large majority.
However the reasons for saying No would be mainly because they are uninformed of the economic consequences of EMU entry.

The arguement of sovereignty doesn't really hold, we are not going to lose our sovereign are we?

The public are not informed enough to make an economic decision like this.

Banks on the other hand are very well informed, they know for example that the interest rates in Euroland are 2% less than they are here in UK what will that do to the economy....not to mention their profits.

The UK Government would lose control of interest rates to the European National Bank, this could be catastrophic for the country.
Adjusting interest rates up or down may work very well to cool the economy in one country but it could have the opposite effect on another so is it good to link economies together in this way.....certainly not.

In my opinion; humble though it may be, we should never ever join the Euro, we should never ever have joined the EU.

My opinions here are purely economic and emotions should not enter the arguement, but they surely will.

So when the Government (for Political reasons) decide to join, there will be a sudden upturn in information coming out they will give it the hard sell, only when the UK is converted will there be a referendum.

So thank you all for helping to ressurect this old thread.
It has cofirmed I think; what we all already know.
Muck
Oh just for the record as this is a travel forum after all, we should never have built a tunnel to France, being an island has its distinct advantages.

;-)

sheila

Dear Flanner;

growth rates over the last few years are .3%, 2/3% and 2.4% over the last 3 years and in Europe 1.4%, .8% and 1.8%. The US has traditionally had a greater growth than Europe and nothing has really changed that, notwithstanding Lisbon. The UK is 1.6%, 2% and 2.6%.

It's non-sense to suggest the Euro destroys economies. And the employment thing is short term.

I do, on the other hand, tend to agree with david's analysis, if not his conclusions.

Lower interest rates tends to stimulate the economy; even that of the banks.

The ECB doesn't seem to have done a bad job so far. Why would it be better or worse than the Bank of England?

david_west

>>The ECB doesn't seem to have done a bad job so far. Why would it be better or worse than the Bank of England?>>>>

Becase, like the American Revolution, it's a bit early to tell if it's working yet.

Once it's got a few decades of stable management under it's belt, and ridden out a few crises, then comparisons can be made.

Until then it's a step in the dark, a step that doesn't really need taking.

romanita

Not before 2008. The main anti-euro campaign group has just mothballed itself.