Brussels sprouts a currency in M&.S's tills, but we don't have to swallow it
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Shiny blue stickers are appearing on the doors of Marks & Spencer, saying We accept the euro.' How deplorably insular. Why does M&S address its customers in English? Why not use the common European language, which, like Luc Vandevelde, the chairman, must be a generalised Belgian? Still, it took M&S for ever to accept credit cards, which are more use to more of its customers and can change their money for them automatically. (Buy a fishcake in Kensington High Street for £1.99 and debit your account in Brussels.) Perhaps someone has told Mr Vandevelde that the new notes and coins will become a parallel currency, jostling for space in his tills and ultimately elbowing sterling out. There is a precedent of a sort in Nigeria, where the official currency, the naira, has to compete (so I am told) with forged U.S $20 bills. As a store of value and a medium of exchange, which are the classical functions of money, the forged dollars tend to do better. So far, of course, the pound has done a good deal better than the euro. The currency whose birth is being celebrated with so much hoopla this week was first launched three years ago with champagne and balloons, and has been freely traded, most of all in London, where the world's biggest market in foreign exchange copes with any number of parallel currencies. The champagne has gone flat, the balloons have gone pop, and the notes and coins amount to no more than a muchneeded relaunch for the euro. They do not amount to any sort of argument for joining. The most insidious argument has always been that Britain is somehow fated to join, whether we like it or not — but if we do not like it, no power or spurious predestination can make us accept it.
No problem
WE have learned this week, thirty years on, that chickenpox brought the Queen out in spots and that when a single currency for Europe was first mooted, the Treasury hated it. Well, surprise, surprise. Like the Common Agricultural Policy, its clumsy forebear, the common monetary policy now looks like a well-meant solution to a problem which has gone away. Money and capital needed to flow freely across Europe's boundaries and barriers, and this would be one way of making it happen. Since then new markets and new technology have done the job for us, helped by the plastic cards we take for granted. Instead, the new currency's advocates claim that it will make prices transparent: that is, easy to compare between one country and another. Since all this requires is a pocket calculator, you have to wonder what all the fuss is about.
Save the mark
TO think that all Europe once trembled before it. The mark went out with the old year and, this being Germany, got a brisk funeral. No flowers, please. Collect your new currency from the banks' cash machines, most of which are working. How tamely the Germans have traded in their strongest institutions for a mess of europottage. Twice in the past century they had seen their money's value destroyed, so they rebuilt their economy round a respectable currency managed by a respected central bank. The combination was formidable. Scarcely ten years ago we were persuaded that we had to hitch the pound to the Bundesbank's wagon. What a rough ride we got, and how cross we were with the wagonmasters for not slowing down to suit us, and how lucky we were that the rope snapped. Then, three years ago, the Germans hitched their wagon to the euro, and what have they got to show for it? A devalued currency, an economy on the brink of recession, and a vestigial central bank which is being pushed out of its nest in Frankfurt by the European Central Cuckoo. Nobody asked them what they thought about this, but they may come to suspect — not for the first time in their history — that they have been tricked into surrendering.
The misfits
HOW the Argentines must wish that they had linked their money's value to the euro. That would have given them a comfortable loose-fitting shoe to slop about in. Instead they linked it to the dollar, which proved far too tight a fit, and has given it gangrene. One size of currency does not fit all (as the Governor of the Bank of England has been reminding the Germans) and economies and currencies change sizes, too, so a certain amount of variation is healthy. The idea behind the single currency, of course, is that everybody's feet will grow to fit it.
Good as gold
NOTHING is as good as gold, and certainly the euro isn't, What a good buy gold has been in bad times, climbing when the world's stock markets were crashing. . Hang on a moment, is somebody spinning these figures? Surely the price of gold has been moving sideways for years? Even that, of course, would be better than the FT-SE Index, which tracks the shares of our leading companies and has lost 16 per cent of its value and is down by a quarter from its peak — but the point is that we are used to measuring the price of gold in dollars. Measure it in euros, and it sparkles. Anyone in any of the dozen countries of the eurozone who distrusted the new currency when it was launched three years ago and switched his money into gold shows a profit of 20 per cent. Now these countries are being papered with promises to pay (in euros, naturally) but gold does not depend on the promises of governments and central bankers. It is the natural ally of the individual against the state or superstate, which is more than can be said of the euro.
Short change
I SHALL miss the ten-franc kir, and the 3,000-lire negroni, too. They were among the euro's more solid or liquid achievements, for its weakness has enabled me to drink on favourable terms in all my preferred destinations in Europe, except, of course. Switzerland, which has kept its nerve and its currency. I found that in Siena a tenner would buy three negronis but that after two I lost control of the experiment. Now we shall all have to adapt to the new currency cocktail and to work out whether, if it = 1.6245 euros, we are being shortchanged by the barman. I expect so, but more research is sure to be needed.
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