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Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

I also buy stuff and services frictionlessly being outside of the EZ. Why trade away your country's monetary sovereignity for the convenience of currency exchange? We all know what happened to Greece and to the Italian economy.

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Monetary sovereignty is an ambiguous concept here in Africa. Many countries use the Dollar as acceptable forms of payment, and countries surrounding South Africa are susceptible to the strength of the Rand compared to say the Namibian Dollar, Botswana Pula or Zim Dollar.. So when many nation's already rely on a secondary currency, why have that currency be the Dollar? Make it a single currency, which works across borders (a major factor for Africans as many work in other countries and send money home) and begin to stabilise African economies together, rather than one at a time via the China/IMF's predatory loans.

I can understand this. But it doesn't have to be te sole currency. Give contries the option of either running their own currency or using a single AU currency both by participaring in the AU or using it unilaterally like Montenegro is using the Euro.

The Greece and Italian economies were mismanaged. The Euro, in and of itself, had little to do with it. At worst, it removed one tool for dealing with the mismanagement. Far better to manage it well in the first place.

Greece maybe. But if Italy's economy was mismanaged it was due to outside pressure.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-to-ruin-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19649182

> Until the early 1990s, Italy enjoyed decades of relatively robust economic growth

This is painting just one side of the story. Look up the graphs for debt as % of GDP in the same years.

Here they are:

https://tradingeconomics.com/italy/government-debt-to-gdp

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rj28mXbk6V8/TsEC58hZftI/AAAAAAAAA...

Sure, we were growing, but more than that we were growing our public debt. I'm no economist, but this doesn't seem the sign of a healthy economy to me.

To put it into the words of my father (Italy early 90s), "the Euro will be good for us because our politicians will have to stop stealing". But they didn't and we kept voting for them. This is the problem in Italy. Internal, not external. Then other countries can take advantage of it, that's the way the world works.

Maybe the businesses in your country improve their conversion rates ever so slightly because of said convenience? We spend time and money to optimize for far sillier things in our funnels.

I do not claim to know the aggregate effects, but I would guess it is not as simple as convenience vs. sovereignity.

Not really. Visa and the banks do take a cut. But there is Revolut now if you want to give them the middle finger. They will be forced to adapt and offer similar services or at least non-ripoff exchange rates. I always prefer a free market solution to an EU buceaucratic solution. Such as EU mandated zero transaction fees in order to convert the bulk of the transactions to cashless, be able to track them and "prevent money laundering", which of course isn't true (eg. Danske bank scandal).

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