Miles Kimball and Ruediger Bachmann

At the inception of the euro, many economists warned about the economic dangers of having a single currency for the entire continent. The problem they foresaw is that having a single currency means having only a single monetary policy for an economically variegated set of countries. Warning about such a problem, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein wrote in 1997 that disharmony would be “exacerbated whenever the business cycle raised unemployment in a particular country or group of countries. These economic disagreements could contribute to a more general distrust among the European nations.”