Delors' china egg
NEXT, the Delors Eurodoggle. It has come to meet a demand identified last summer by Anthony Loehnis of the Bank of England: 'The current scramble to find something for a European Central Bank to do to justify its creation.' Now M. Delors and his committee of central bankers, brooding on this, have laid their egg, pre-scrambled. They want to point Europe towards monetary union, by way of rates of exchange 'irrevocably' locked. Query: if the lock is really irrevocable, why bother to have more than one currency? Certainly you cannot have more than one rate of interest. This plan is urged on a Commun- ity which is still a long way from being a common market, where the barriers to the free movement of goods and services and capital still include exchange controls. It is ludicrous to suppose that such a Commun- ity is ready to dash towards a common currency. It is chimerical to propose monetary union as a means towards econo- mic union. As well establish a common European temperature by making all the thermometers give the same reading. (Come to think of it, we shall soon be asked to do that with the clocks.) Already, though, we can see the signs of a splendid Eurodoggle — what study groups, what stately offices, what air tickets, what a power base! The Governor of the Bank of England, having brooded patiently. for month after month, cannot disclaim the egg, but is in favour of giving it time, any amount of time. It might become a hundred-year egg, such as is popular in China. It might (and he could restrain his grief) go off. I shall ask him to present Jacques Delors' award, a Euro China Egg.
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