I'd like to get some opinions on an issue that I haven't seen discussed much on this forum. We've had threads and threads of dollar discussions, silver, gold, etc... but what about the Euro? How realistic do you guys think is a scenario where the Euro will collapse in the foreseeable future? It appears that the debt is mounting on the European Union because of countries like Greece, Portugal, Ireland, etc., and the only players in the game who can bail them out (Germany and France) are reluctant to do so because their previous bailouts did not achieve any positive results... so where do we go from here? A collapse of the Euro and disbanding the European Union? Or is that a fringe theory? The US definitely does not have the means to bail out Europe, since we're stuck here in our own pile of, uhhh... "poop".
I think its conceivable that the Euro would downsize considerably if one of two things happen: 1. Mass worker riots in affected countries, (Greece, Portugal, Ireland), causes collapse of governments and new governments renouncing austerity measures. 2. Unexpected bad news out of Italy and France shakes those countries financial ability to backstop the other countries. In either case I think northern European countries and Italy will continue to use the Euro and let the rest of the countries fall back to their traditional currencies. How that would shake out would be unknown, I am not sure anyone knows how they would withdraw Euros issued by those countries. I would guesstimate the chances of this at 25%.
You could still have the union without the single currency, we in the UK are in it but not in the euro! after all it was not introduced until 1 January 1999 up until then we all meanderd along with our own national currencies LOL I beleive that 17 of the 27 member states use it at the moment with 7 of the other 10 in line to join once they have met certain standards (assuming they still wish to do so)
I think they may be realizing the Euro experiment is a failure. A few dozen diverse countries with differing economies and work ethics all using a common currency is a recipe for disaster.
