This was a brand-new everyday currency for a brand-new super-national aggregation with an uncertain future. A few oscillations were to be expected at the beginning. It’s been fairly stable since, from a global perspective and relative to previous national-currency oscillations in the zone, with some peaks - remember when Jay-Z asked to be paid in Euros for US concerts?
1 Like
I mainly remember a colleague in Sienna going on a 15 minute rant about what the switch did to the cost of an espresso.
1 Like
Ah yeah, in Italy it felt like daytime robbery. I was there. We were all pretty certain prices had doubled overnight, which they must have - as your colleague said, something that used to cost L1500 quickly went to more than 1 Euro, which means more than L1930. It really looked like retail prices had basically replaced L1000 with E1, basically doubling everything. I’m sure I didn’t dream it, it seemed pretty obvious at the time.
Because of this widely-held belief, Italian economists have been studying the phenomenon for 15 years and goddamn, they just cannot find it. They just can’t. All statistics seem to tally with the actual exchange rate. They cross-analized sectors and done all sorts of work because, shit, we didn’t dream it! And still, numbers say it was all good. I’m convinced retailers made a special effort at hiding the discrepancy, sending the money to Santo Domingo or something, but that’s kinda hard to prove (if not to believe - it’s Italy, independent studies estimate that almost a third of tax revenues is “lost” in any given year…).
I agree with you that prices seemed to double with the switch, though we found a way to lose a lot of money due to fluctuations in the exchange rate (my wife sold her flat in Rome in 1999-2000, the transfer and conversion of the currency took place during a peak in the Euro’s value).
2 Likes
Har har har!
an increasingly insular UK
That’s about right (actually, it is right)
trigger negotiations using Royal Prerogative, without consulting Parliament
Nothing dictatorial about that, eh?!
Man, the UK doesn’t see that the world is sharpening its claws for some ‘pay me back for that slavery shit, bitch!’ and ‘You thought it was funny to crush us with opium?! Watch this! And This!’
It’s the end, folks, the end of the end.
Watching the pound/dollar exchange rate over the last couple of days has been fascinating. The rate is enormously unstable, like it needs defibrillation. Markets apparently can’t decide whether Trump’s victory is good or bad for the dollar w/r to Brexit Britain. After a brief plunge the dollar has been rising rapidly compared to the Euro (again, for reasons I can’t comprehend), much more than the oscillations of the $/GBP exchange, which means the pound is also rising rapidly against the Euro.
So you UK-ers, you can probably thank a Trump victory for giving a boost to the pound (albeit small compared to the drop since last year).
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 127 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
