In the Christensen family we believe in efficiency – so we are three generations of Christensen men that have their birthdays over a period of just five days. My dad – grandfather Flemming on March 1 (66 years), my son Mathias yesterday (3 years) and myself today (42 years). So I shouldn’t really be blogging – it is my birthday after all and this morning my friend David C in South Korea wrote me on Facebook that I should not think about Market Monetarism today. I normally listens to David’s suggestions, but not this time.

So I am sorry David to be letting you down – as I told you I can’t help myself, but the kids are sleeping now and I am nearly out of champagne. So here is a very short blog post. My excuse is that after five days of birthday parties I need to get back to ‘normality’.

When Bernard Connolly’s book The Rotten Heart of Europe came out in the mid-1990s I read it and the book influenced my view of the euro (and fixed exchange rates) a great deal. Bernard even signed my copy of the book when he back in the 1990s spoke at a seminar in Copenhagen. I sadly lost the book in someway so last year I had to buy a new copy of the book or rather it was a used copy of the book as The Rotten Heart of Europe long has been out of print.

However, today I found out that the book has just (in January) been republished – with a new preface. My colleague Hollie sent me this from the preface:

‘The crisis of the euro – a wholly predictable and indeed inevitable crisis – has been seized on eagerly by the European nomenklatura to justify the suppression of referendums, the eviction of democratically elected governments in manoeuvres reminiscent of Stalin’s tactics in Eastern Europe after the war, their replacement by technocrats, and, above all, the transfer of ever more extensive powers to the unelected, unaccountable and explicitly antidemocratic bodies: the Eurogroup; the European Central Bank; the European Financial Stabilisation facility; the European Stability Mechanism – which, astonishingly, has complete legal immunity for itself and its officers; the International Monetary Fund; the G20; the various banking and financial supervisory bodies; and the projected ‘economic government’ of the euro area charged with ensuring fiscal “discipline”.’ ‘The outcome of monetary union has thus been, as predicted explicitly in this book in 1995, the destruction not only of prosperity but of political legitimacy, in every country in Europe…’

Needless to say – I bought my third copy of the book today. I suggest you do that same thing.