> Seriously, no doubt the euro is going to be important, but unless the Europeans
> become more internationalist than they have been, the euro mya just go the route
> of the yen.
More internationalist? The EU is already the biggest single market on the planet, with the soundest asset base, the biggest banking system (assets of close to 11 trillion EUR, far larger than the US banking system asset base of around 3.7 trillion EUR). EU banks are the biggest source of capital to the world-economy, as BIS statistics on global lending (available over at www.bis.org in downloadable pdf format) show, far larger than Japan or the US. Latin America owes more debt to the EU than to the USA, and the EU is the biggest creditor in Asia, too (Japan is in second place, the US is a distant third).
And then there's this myth that the yen, and Japan, is doomed. I'm collecting some stats on the Japanese keiretsu and will post those later today, but suffice to say that Japan Inc. is a very, very, *very* big and liquidity-flushed gorilla indeed.
-- Dennis