roach118_Artur WidakNurPhoto via Getty Images_currency Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

From American to European Exceptionalism

An overvalued US dollar is ripe for a sharp decline, owing to America’s rapidly worsening macroeconomic imbalances and a government that is abdicating all semblance of global – or even domestic – leadership. And the European Union's approval of a joint rescue fund is likely to accelerate the euro's rise.

NEW HAVEN – Those are tough words to swallow for a hardcore Euroskeptic. Like many, I have long been critical of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union as a dysfunctional currency area. Notwithstanding a strong political commitment to European unification as the antidote to a century of war and devastating bloodshed, there was always a critical leg missing from the EMU stool: fiscal union.

Not anymore. The historic agreement reached on July 21 on a €750 billion ($868 billion) European Union recovery fund, dubbed Next Generation EU, changes that – with profound and lasting implications for both an overvalued US dollar and an undervalued euro.

Unlike the United States, which appears to be squandering the opportunities presented by the epic COVID-19 crisis, Europe has risen to the occasion – and not for the first time. In July 2012, in the depths of a seemingly fatal sovereign debt crisis, then-ECB President Mario Draghi vowed to do “whatever it takes” to defend the beleaguered euro. While that pledge solidified the European Central Bank’s credibility as an unshakable guardian of the single currency, it did nothing to address the greater imperative: the need to trade national sovereignty for a pan-European fiscal transfer mechanism.

https://prosyn.org/2j00C8o