Bloomberg News Catherine Hickley in Berlin has an excellent story up today on the early 1990scollapse of the ruble zone, a group of 15 countries that shareda currency. Hickley covers culture for Bloomberg, not economics, and she bringsthat unique perspective to an important article. She quotes HaroldJames, a Princeton University economic historian whom I veinterviewed for several stories. The Soviet experience tells us an exit like this is messy and leads to loss of income andinflation, and people are right to be scared of it, says James,who wrote The End of Globalization: Lessons From the Great Depression . The ruble zone was an attempt to preserve economic integration ofthe former Soviet Union states after they attained politicalindependence. Although the Russian central bank was the only one ofthe 15 national banks with a license to print rubles, all of themcould issue credit. Sounds a lot like the relationship between theEuropean Central Bank and national fiscal authorities. The Soviet Union was formed after World War I, the European Unionafter World War II. Both came under stress when the generationsthat built them began to die off. Hickley elicits a smart take from Mark Mazower, director of theCenter for International History at Columbia University in New Yorkand the author of Dark Continent: Europe s Twentieth Century. The EU was driven by an ideological vision of the elite, saysMazower, who has also written books about Greece s economic crisisbetween the wars and the Nazi occupation of the country. Once acertain ideological vision of the future is belied by events, youhave a problem. Such a loss of confidence in its ideology wasdevastating for the Soviet Union, he says. To date, inflation is one big difference between the ruble zone scrackup and the stresses on the euro zone. Ukraine had an averagequarterly inflation rate of about 100 percent from the secondquarter of 1992 through the third quarter of 1993, according toPatrick Conway, a professor of economics at the University of NorthCarolina. In contrast, inflation is low across the 17-nation eurozone. The problem instead is deep recession. In hindsight, it s amazing that the planners of the euro currencydidn t think more about the failure of the ruble zone when theywere building their own grand architecture. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Natural Male sex Enhancement Manufacturer , Natural Slimming Pills for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Slimming Belly Patch.
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