"A Giant Historic Mistake"

Giant Historic Mistake

You've got to admire people who say what they think in colorful terms.  But what is it about the Euro that Ken Rogoff finds disastrous?  Is it the simplest possible observation that individual Eurozone countries "lost control" of their monetary policies?  The article we link here doesn't say.  We'll go for a different reason (which may well be ours rather than Rogoff's).  The ECB and European leaders wrongly interpreted "single currency" to mean "the Central Bank mandate now includes sustaining insolvent banks and sovereigns."  That's not what the Maastricht Treaty says, but that's what has happened in practice.