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31 Aug, 2011 15:16

Czech leader brands Eurozone a straitjacket

The president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, has lashed out at the Eurozone, comparing it to a straitjacket, and suggesting cutting the number of nations using the common European currency to increase stability.

Speaking at an economic summit in Austria, the president blamed the EU's financial crisis on “the enormous heterogeneity of countries finding themselves in the straitjacket of a common currency."The Czech Prime Minister, Petr Necas, also questioned his country's requirement to join the currency bloc, saying, "We agreed to join a [monetary] union, not a transfer union or debt union."Johan Van Overtveldt, editor-in-chief of Trends magazine, told RT that the monetary union that exists in Europe, has some very significant structural handicaps. Because of that, the union faces a full-blown crisis that threatens the survival of the Eurozone.“There is so much political capital invested in this project it will be hard if not impossible for the politicians to give up on the idea of the monetary union,” he declared. “If you look at it from the economic point of view, we have indeed a situation that is a lot more doubtful than the politicians like to admit.”The growing hostility towards the Euro among nations once queuing to join the prestigious club has been making headlines for quite a while, but now nations that are economically stable have started mulling the possibility of shedding the dead weight.Germany's ruling party has announced it wants a Eurozone exit-mechanism for countries unable to meet the criteria for membership. Van Overtveldt says that this is a big step, considering the "no economy left behind" policy when this crisis started.“Everything arrived at the situation where it would be rather shameful to accept the exit of a country [from the eurozone,]” he said. “But what should be the real focus is that we don’t have the conditions met to have a structurally-healthy monetary union. And unless we do something about that we will have one crisis country after another.”

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