The Euro

Dizer writes: "Today sees the historic introduction of the new European Currency (Euro) into European hands. The Eurozone market, with a population of 300 million people, will be cashing in their Punts, Francs and Deutschmarks in favour of the new common Euro currency. This is the biggest currency transition in history, vive l'Europe! See stories on ireland.com or the BBC."

Comments

Picture of bills with US bill

[Therlin]

I was able to get a hold of a couple Euros and I took a picture with the only bill I had at home at the moment (a $2 bill)

Picture of a 5 Euro bill, 10 Euro bill, 1 Euro coin

They are pretty cool looking.

Re:One simple reason why it won't work:

[Lemmy Caution]

What are you talking about? What restrictions on moving and working in other European countries are you refering to?

One of the advantages that Europe has is that language and culture maintain national entities in such a way as to resist the "winner take all" scenario, in which all the educated professionals move to a tiny handful of economic supercenters. Economic growth can be distributed geographically more in Europe, but it has nothing to do with any restrictions on travel.

One of the ironies of economic popular wisdom in the 90's is apparent by the fact that Brazil, with its protectionist policies, is doing reasonably well, while Argentina, which did almost everything the IMF and the US banking establishment told it to it, is about to go toes-up. The Argentine disaster could spell the end of WTO-styled globalism far more than the protests of Seattle etc. ever could

Issues with the euro in day-to-day life

[Xouba]

Well, being one of the 300 million affected, I just thought that I could karma whore a little and get an "informative" mod by telling you (the non-european or non-affected-even-if-european people) a few issues that arise in real life with this change :-) Let's hope not to be another of a million messages about this O:-)

• First, I suppose that you don't really imagine what this change means for every Joe European's day-to-day life. In Spain, 1 euro is 166.386 pesetas. There's a few rough equivalences, like 6 euro = 1000 pesetas, but anyway it's quite tricky to know, for example, how many euros are 135 pesetas, or how many pesetas are 4.27 euros. And many people (me, at least) need to know that equivalences in the first days, to make an idea about what you are paying.
• Given this difficulties, every government has tried its best to inform every citizen about the equivalences, how to use the euro ... and has made available a kind of "calculators" that consist in a little plastic piece that shows euros and their equivalences in the local currency, to be used by everyone. They're pretty cool, if someone is able to take a photo of any and post it, please do :-)
• The devil is in the details, as they say, and in this case the devil is in the rounding. As I said, 6 euros are roughly 1000 pesetas. But that's not exact: 6.01 is more precise. This doesn't mean anything in "cheap" things, but if you're going to buy a car ... There's a lot of concern about the way that commerces are going to apply rounding, as many think that they're going to raise prices to make them more "euro-compliant".
• Most of the prices were already both in euros and local currency since months ago, so everyone could make an idea about what prices were going to be like in euros (a cinema ticket is about 4 euros in "spectator's day", for example). But anyway, in my personal experience, nobody looked at the prices in euros, so the impact of this measure is, for me, doubtful :-) Anyway, bussiness have to work in euros from now on, and most of them were already prepared when year's end came.
• There's no 25 cents coin. Someone tell me why, because I don't understand it. Specially since a coffe here is about 125 pesetas, which is roughly 0.75 euro. We've got 2 and 20 cents coins, but anyway, I don't know why there're no 25 cents coins.
• As someone already said, the coins are pretty cool :-) A few of them are in two colors, and have a face with a local design and the other with a common european one.

• There's more, but I don't recall anything specially interesting now, so let's hope that another one with a better english and memory can say something more fulfilling ;-)

Re:Coming from a store owner...

[Sanity]

The new anti-counterfeit measures contained in the Euro. This may seem like a good thing, but the larger Euro demoniations contain coils electromagnetically charged to a certain serial number. This can thus be tracked, and as much as consumers are worried about their privacy, merchants are worried about ours in respect to competitors.

Er no they don't, didn't you see the article here just a few days ago about how they were considering doing this, but didn't expect to see it before 2006?

The attitude here in London is mostly anti-Euro, as Brits object to this new prospect of a continental government.

Speak for yourself, there are many in the UK who are pro-Euro.

We've been independent for this long, and under no means do we want to be governed by someone higher than the Parliament

Such as, um, the WTO? Or perhaps the US government who seems to be making the decisions about how the UK uses its military these days?

This is such a short sighted view point. Only through cooperation can European countries have a say in world affairs, the UK, a country of about 60 million people, will be ignored in the face of trading blocks of 300 million people and upwards.

Sooner or later, the UK will come crawling into the Euro with its tail between its legs, and feeling rather stupid.

Re:Cash movements

[Joe Decker]

I'd guess that in a few years you'd have a pretty even distribution (actually one based on the relative proportion of coins produced by each country.), perhaps some bit of "more coins of my own country" still visible left in the distribution.

I can provide some data from a loosely analogous situation in the United States. US bills are printed at 12 locations in the US, and are originally distributed to banks based on which of the 12 districts that bank is located in.

I'm part of a fun projectthat involves tracking the motion of US currency. I live near (60 miles from) San Francisco--here are the locations the bills I've marked come from, and their relative proportion.

San Francisco 776 32.0%
Kansas City 323 13.3%
New York 205 8.5%
Dallas 187 7.7%
Minneapolis 182 7.5%
Chicago 146 6.0%
Atlanta 133 5.5%
St. Louis 129 5.3%
Cleveland 99 4.1%
Boston 97 4.0%
Richmond 82 3.4%
Philadelphia 63 2.6%

Now, while the banks print out different numbers of bills and such, it's pretty clear that the San Francisco printed bills dominate my sample.

This analogy is unlike the situation with Euro coins for at least one reason--the lifetime of bills is much shorter than the lifetime of coins. Bills tend to last a year or two in circulation, coins for a decade or more. So, as time goes on, I'd expect mixing to be a much larger effect for coins in the EU than it is for bills in the US...