The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency

Given the global turbulence of the last year, especially in the f/x markets its great to read about the Euro after seeing 1000 books on the dollar and someone's not so new perspective on it. This book goes through the history and evolution of how the currency was formed, its many iterations over time, and the different personalities that shaped the ECB politics, priorities and eventual mechanics. The Euro and the ECB have obviously been evolving over their history, in particular over the last year as turbulence overwhelmed economics and in particular central banks macroeconomic models about factors of growth and trade and counterparty fear manifestations. This book does well to describe the conservativeness and aggressiveness of the members separately and their power and bargaining power in setting up a cross country currency regime. It gives insight into the way that the Euro was less quick to move than other central banks. This is probably unsurprising to most as the ECB constraints were pretty well known, focusing on inflation alone, but the origin of the tensions and fears that made the ECB mandate more narrow are all described in this book. I am sure that more books on the Euro will follow, but this was very informative and gave a good sense of the history and politics of the bank and the countries within. It was interesting for both refreshing some of the personalities of former politicians and their parts played in sometimes constructing, sometimes delaying the eventual currency unification.

David Marsh knows Europe wrote a excellent book about the New United Europe & common currency.