Summary of Joseph E. Stiglitz's The Euro is Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz’s evisceration of the euro as the cause of political and economic turmoil in Europe today.
From the very start, the decision to create a single currency for Europe was a major mistake founded on faulty ideology and misconceived economic principles. The economic half-truths that guided the construction of the eurozone no longer hold water in 2016 and are outdated.
The eurozone is a group of 19 countries with very different political, cultural, and economic systems. By binding them together on minimal convergence criteria and without the structural backbone to keep them unified, the eurozone failed to create an ecosystem of shared risk and reward that would also provide the flexibility necessary for individual countries to manage crises autonomously. What’s more, the austerity measures applied to crisis countries have been unfairly punitive and…
