Verbatim report of proceedings

Wednesday, 7 May 2008 - Brussels

EMU@10 – The first ten years of Economic and Monetary Union (Commission communication) (debate)

  Jens-Peter Bonde, on behalf of the IND/DEM Group. – (DA) Madam President, if we were to exclude all the countries that had breached the rules of monetary union, there would soon not be many members left. Inflation is now at around 3.6%, even though 2% was promised. Monetary union is based on a design fault. The inflation target was taken from the German model, even though the Germans only met the requirement in 6 of the 30 years prior to the introduction of European monetary union. How crazy! How can we take such a target seriously and make it sacred without regard to other targets? The price of money is a means, not an end. The goal of economic policy must be to create full employment and to ensure that everyone goes home with a salary instead of benefit.

Monetary and currency policy must help people, not plunge them into poverty. In the United States, the annual rate of growth from 1990 to 2007 over 17 years was 2.9%, while in the EU it was just 2%. Every single citizen in the monetary union could have been EUR 38 000 better off with a different policy if the growth rate in Europe had only matched that in the United States before the latest crisis. It is a very high price to pay for an ideological project to eliminate the national currencies. We must either have a common state with a common government and a common parliament with responsibility for all economic policy, or we must allow the individual countries to manage their own currencies and be content with a common currency with which to finance cross-border trade. That is the lesson to be learned from the monetary union fiasco.

Without reforms, it is not difficult to foresee the breakdown of monetary union. Perhaps it will be Berlusconi’s Italy who will fall overboard first and have to rediscover the lira. I am pleased that we still have the good old Danish krone in Denmark! All the statements from our politicians concerning the economic difficulties they said would arise if we rejected the euro have been exposed as a sham. The Danes voted ‘no’ on 2 June 1992. We again voted ‘no’ on 28 September 2000. I wonder whether, if we do not also vote ‘no’ for a third time, the politicians will offer to take the money from us.