Euro In Freefall

by JASmius



This is actually a ray of hope.  I keep forgetting the adage that if you want to see where America will be in a generation, look at Europe now.

True, Barack Obama has cut that buffer down to a decade at most, but as Klingon Chancellor Gowron once said in another context, "....perhaps someday; but not today":

A day after the European Central Bank unveiled its bond-buying program, the single currency still was in free fall, blowing past analysts’ expectations for how low the euro can go.

"Still"?  They thought debt-monetization and runaway currency debasement would slow the devaluation of the euro?

Some investors now say the euro could fall to the point where it is on equal footing with the U.S. dollar for the first time since it climbed above the buck in late 2002.

“If you would have asked me a few months ago, I would’ve said that parity could be in the cards in the years ahead. Now, we can’t rule it out anymore even by the end of this year,” said Thomas Kressin, head of European foreign exchange at Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, which has $1.68 trillion under management.

Late Friday in New York, the euro fell 1.4% against the dollar, to $1.1206, on top of a 2.1% slide the day before. It is now down 7.4% against the dollar since the turn of the year and is at its lowest point in more than eleven years.

Morgan Stanley cut its estimate of where the euro will end 2015 to $1.05 from $1.12 previously. Bank of America Merrill Lynch sees the euro now falling to $1.10 by the end of the year, from $1.20 in an earlier forecast, while HSBC Holdings PLC analysts cut their year-end expectation to $1.09 from $1.15.

The miracle, my friends, is that the Euros managed to prop up the fiction that this make-believe, fiat Monopoly money was a real currency for this long.  That, and it apparently actually is possible to devalue currency that always was wastepaper.  Hell, reducing all of it to ashes would enhance its value at this point.

You know the old saying about how a currency goes, so goes its country, right?

Perhaps the answer to this question.....



....isn't far from being answered.