The drama of 1992 showed why Germany cannot lead Europe out of a monetary crisis. Few problems in economics are genuinely new. Virtually every scenario you care to think of has been played out before in some shape or form. Thus it is with the eurozone debt crisis, which has some striking parallels with the debacle of Britain’s entanglement with the European exchange rate mechanism back in the early Nineties. Today’s crisis is of course infinitely more complex, intractable and serious, but it shares many of the same characteristics. The central issue – that it is next to impossible to maintain a currency union with ... (full story)