For whom the Euro tolls - Martin Feldstein and Bernard Connolly's old predictions playing out today

Seventeen years ago, Bernard Connolly who was running the European Commission's Monetary Affairs Unit, the Brussels bureaucracy charged with ushering the euro into being and publicly expressed his doubts and the misery that awaited the European Union in a book called "The Rotten Heart of Europe," he was promptly fired. According to Mr. Connolly, the European political believes that the crisis "hit its high point last summer in 2012 because that was when there was an imminent danger, from their point of view, that their wonderful dream would disappear." But from the perspective "of real live people, and families and firms and economies," he says, the situation "is just getting worse and worse." Similarly Harvard professor Martin Feldstein who expressed doubts about the Euro fifteen years ago (see BBC news clip above) is seeing his predictions play out today. For all their faults, the US dollar and the pound sterling still provide a modicum of safety, however small, while gold may be a holder of monetary value in the short term.