What a lot of talk is going on these days about the advent of the Euro. Long discussions among and about citizens worried about the introduction of the new currency. On the one hand, the debates are focused on arguments of little importance. On the other, they ignore an unforgivable blunder. There’s much ado about nothing and a tomb of silence over a walloping unwarrantable oversight.
Everyone seems to be terribly concerned about the rounding off of prices. No one seems to grasp the fact that having cents eliminates the need for rounding off. And even if prices are rounded off, it’s only a temporary phenomenon. In Italy, they reason as if the Lira were going to continue to exist, as if a year from now, we’ll still be here trying to figure out how much we would have paid for something in Lira. They ignore the fact that many producers and merchants should have been raising prices in the last months, due to their own rising costs. However, they have avoided doing so in view of the coming currency, preferring to incorporate the raising of prices with the currency conversion. That means, if anything, consumers have been at an advantage for the last few months with prices that were being maintained artificially low, prices that didn’t reflect the true costs of production and commercialization.
The problem with the Euro lies elsewhere. As a teacher of Law and Economics in Italy, I have dedicated several lessons to studying the new legal tender, the economic benefits of having a single European currency, and the advantages for consumers. The first day the coins became available, I discovered that one of my students had brought the packet with him to school. I asked him if I could see them with every intention of celebrating this great event. So when he poured all of those coins into my two open hands, I was ready to express my joy over the occasion. I have no idea what expression I had on my face when I saw them, but the first words that came out of my mouth were, “Oh my God! What have they done to us!”
What’s wrong, you ask? Everything, as far as I’m concerned. The first thing I noted was that there are too many coins and too little difference between them. The size changes very little between the 1cent, the 2 cent, and the 5 cent copper colored coins, and the 10 cent, the 20 cent, and the 50 cent yellow colored coins. The one Euro coin has a white center and a yellow border and the 2 Euro coin has a yellow center with a white border. From this description it might seem like, yes, there are a lot of different coins, but that the different colors make them easily distinguishable from each other. Not so. The yellow isn’t very yellow. The white isn’t very white. And even the copper is neither here nor there. They seem like the subtle shades of the three golds by Cartier. Subtlety is exquisite in jewelry, but these coins are supposed to be useful for buying our daily bread.
Besides that, now when a coin falls (since coins don’t readily and willingly lie where they fall, right there next to our feet, but rather roll about and hide behind some piece of furniture or get caught in a crack) we won’t know if we’ve lost a few cents or a couple of dollars! If they really had to be so whimsical with so many coins, they could have at least made them square or triangular. At least we’d be able to tell them apart and they would lie where they fell!
For months now we have had posters up with pictures of all of the new coins and banknotes for all of the participating European countries. On the poster the colors were very distinct and the designs in relief. We took it for granted that if they looked that good on the poster, in reality they could only be even better, even more beautiful.
That they are beautiful or not is of no importance. Money was invented to facilitate trade, and this money decidedly fails that mission. And I saw them in the perfect light of day! Imagine at night! Or what it will be like for older people. The only thing they managed to do a good job of is the lateral markings for the blind. For them, the Euro coins will be much easier. But what about the rest of us?
If I had the power to do so, I’d fire everyone that was responsible for this blunder. I’d fine them heavily. I’d even put them in jail. These people were paid outrageous sums of money to conceive, plan, and implement this fiasco.
The idea of a united Europe was a noble vision born in the minds of several true statesmen. The trouble is that just when the moment came for Europe to seriously happen, it fell into the hands of a group of commonplace social bureaucrats whose vision reaches no further than what lies under their very own noses.
December 2001
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