Take your seat… Why the Euro is here to stay!

By Rolf Strom-Olsen, Director of Studies and Professor at IE University

Articles and media reports predicting the imminent demise of the Euro have become so commonplace over the last months that I suspect the next release of Microsoft Word will include it as a new document template: blank page, letter, CV, “Euro is doomed” article. A quick search on Google for the exact phrase “the euro is doomed” produces so many results (over 65,000), that I cannot even be bothered to look for variants. Pundits and politicians, bloggers and journalists, have all climbed aboard the euro-is-doomed train and cannot wait to tell us all about the destination which is envisioned, variously, as end-of-Euro land, end-of-Europe-itself land, global-financial-Armageddon land (for the real enthusiasts), etc….

Muh. Send us a postcard when you arrive.

That is a postcard I don’t expect to receive. Why not? Simply put because the so-called euro crisis is the product of a narrative gone wild. It has swept up otherwise sober-minded people and produced a wave of incessant hysterical shrieking, fulfilling that deep lizard-brain desire to really enjoy a catastrophe.

Except that catastrophe is largely an artefact of a market-, media- and punditry-driven narrative, increasingly divorced from the underlying reality of what is going on.

What we are really looking at is a sovereign debt crisis rephrased into a “euro-is-doomed” narrative. How sustainable is that? About as sustainable as Greek borrowing patterns.