Latvia received approval from the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) to become the 18th member of the eurozone from January 1, 2014. Estonia, which borders with Latvia to the north, adopted the euro in 2011, while the southern neighbor, Lithuania, intends to enter that club in 2015. The link below has pictures of the actual banknotes from Latvia. http://www.numisbrazilis.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/lats-cedulas.html
Interesting... latvia is the country with a weak economy. I don't think that the membership in eurozone will be a good idea. It will be the second Cyprus. Latvia in eurozone = new problems in eurozone.
Latvia is not qualified for EU either in my estimation, not when you have a whole significant percentage of population that has no rights afforded to citizens of Latvia though they have lived there many decades or all their lives. No country in the whole EU gets away with so much legalised discrimination.
With what has happened economically in the eurozone recently I don't understand why any other countries would want to join. To me it looks like a really bad idea right now.
Well, the Latvian government does not share your opinion. Whether this is a wise move or not - keep in mind that Latvia, or rather the lats, has been in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM-II) for about eight years. The Latvian currency has thus been at a pretty much fixed exchange rate since then. Also, remember what some people, notably in the US and the UK, said when Estonia joined the euro area in 2011? How dare they do that, the euro is doomed anyway, does not sound like a good idea, and so on. For some odd reason both the euro and Estonia are still around. We sure have substantial problems that need to be addressed, and of course nobody has a cure-all remedy. But maybe the "Baltic perspective" is a little different. After all, as mentioned in the initial post, Lithuania plans to join the euro area (in 2015) as well. Christian
Nice coin, but from Lithuania. That horseman (Vytis) will be on all Lithuanian euro and cent coins, according to the current plans. Back to Latvia, here are the designs of their euro coins (from the central bank's site). The 1, 2 and 5 cent pieces feature the small coat of arms, the 10, 20 and 50 cent coins show the large CoA, and the €1 and €2 pieces will have the Latvian Maiden design. Christian
I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert by any means, but just as someone who reads the news it seems like a lot of weaknesses of a common currency which covers many separate nations have recently been exposed. As you are someone who lives in Germany, which seems to be getting the worst of the deal right now, I'm curious if and why you support it? To me it looks like it creates a lot of conflict when one nation is asked to sacrifice to help another nation when it has no control over that nation's spending policies.
SO let me get this right, there are European countries that suck so bad that they are not allowed in the Euro Zone? Thats actually really funny. Here in the US if one state sucks, we all suck together...
With the way the Euro zone has been growing these past 10 years, I wonder if it's time for the US to start admitting some new states. Or, one could look at what's been going on over there and decide the opposite...
... is not quite what the euro is. The European Union is not 27 (or 28 as from 1 July) separate countries - by joining the EU you give up some sovereignty. A country that is not willing to deal with that should stay out, or leave, as the example of the UK will hopefully soon show. Even if a country "only" joins the EEA (such as Norway), it will be subject to EU legislation. In the history of the European Union there have been many cases where the "start it now, fix it on the way" method has worked fine. And like some others, I hoped that would apply to the currency union too. Well, has not really worked so far. May have something to do with the "renaissance" of nationalism in various European countries, may have other reasons. As for "helping out", in my opinion there is nothing wrong with that - we do that within Germany too: "Poorer" states get compensation, to some extent, from "richer" states. How far this goes with regard to the euro, is an issue that even the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) in DE is currently trying to decide. And "no control" is certainly not correct; ask the Greek for example about the difficult changes the country has been going through. Ah well, in Coin Talk many euro topics lead to discussions like this one, with mostly political comments. Maybe because this is basically an American site, dunno. Fine, but that is why I hardly ever write anything euro-related here (except for replies maybe) and rather take it elsewhere: Somebody posts that Latvia is about to join the currency union, in a coin forum, and shortly afterwards you see replies about why the country should not be in the euro area, or not even be in the European Union. Christian
I do really like the pre-World War II Latvian coins, by the way. I think it's something about the font that just looks old fashioned and neat.
I agree, the 5 Lats coin is a true classic, even when the USSR called in all of the Latvian currency in 1940 onwards, they never destroyed the silver coins! In fact they were just locked away in vaults and were filtered out to numismatists through sales from their Mezhnumizmatika venture. Somewhere I have an old Mezhnumizmatika brochure that lists them and the prices - at the time the prices were high - but nowadays they were a good deal.
Big piece of silver Thanks for posting the photos. I would like to get the new Latvian Maiden Euro coins when they are available. Here is the Latvian Maiden NEWP I posted a few months ago.
