Jean-Jacques Rosa was one of the first, and one of the few, professional economists to consistently warn against the hazards of implementing a single currency and creating the "euro zone."

The author of more than ten books on political economy, Dr. Rosa is an economist who is familiar with finance, public choice, and organizational analysis of firms and other institutions. He likes to apply fundamental but non-technical (although rigorous) economic reasoning to social and political phenomena.

Dr. Rosa was an economic adviser to the French Prime Minister, 1997-1999. He founded the MBA program and two doctoral programs in business finance at the Inst. of Political Studies, Paris, which takes a practical and broad-based approach to the study of economic, political and social problems; he taught at Sciences Po from 1978 to 2008 and is now a Professor Emeritus.

The euro zone is clearly not an optimal single currency area, and thus the euro has been the worst governmental mistake since deflationary policy turned the 1929 crisis into a decade of depression. The book explains why European politicians and...

The euro zone is clearly not an optimal single currency area, and thus the euro has been the worst governmental mistake since deflationary policy turned the 1929 crisis into a decade of depression. The book explains why European politicians and businessmen decided nevertheless to circumvent democratic consent in order to lock their societies into a single European super-state and reap the advantages of monetary cartelization, pushing the Great Contraction towards a new Great Depression in Europe. It also shows that exit from the euro is indeed possible and how to minimize its ineluctable cost.

The author set out the problems inherent in the idea of the Euro before it was even created. His book Euro Error (trans. Algora 1999) was prescient. The dire forecasts have been amply fulfilled. More than ten years after the error, the puzzle of why most elites in continental Europe went so completely wrong (from a general welfare point of view), are explained for the first time in the literature.

How the euro exacerbated the Great Recession in Europe is also precisely demonstrated, and the sophism of those who claim that no exit is ever possible is clearly exposed and criticized. The best way out of the single currency is for the first time delineated.

The writing style is clear and the reading easy, nontechnical, but strictly based on rigorous economic analysis. Few books in English treat of the topic in a nontechnical way, whereas there is a flurry of newspapers articles and blog comments on the subject. The book’s comparative advantage is in a simple and synthetic explanation of the initial mistake, but it adds an original analysis of the fundamental reasons why it was made in the first place. It is also original in that it criticizes the current dogma of the impossibility of euro exit (or break up) without a major financial apocalypse, and explains how to proceed to return the European economies to a growth path and independent monetary policies, while avoiding at the same time the trap of a catastrophic financial meltdown.

    Introduction         1. An Unreasonable Choice             When Monetary Union Brings Impoverishment             Disadvantageous Monetary Unions, Viable and Non Viable   

    Introduction   
     1. An Unreasonable Choice   
         When Monetary Union Brings Impoverishment   
         Disadvantageous Monetary Unions, Viable and Non Viable   
         When Federalism Brings Impoverishment   
         An Inherently Destabilizing Mechanism   
     2. But What Political Advantage?   
         Cartels and the Interest of Debtors   
        A Mercantilist Bargain   
        Adverse Effects and Self-Destruction   
     3. How All This Will End   
         A More Realistic Assessment of the Cost of Getting Out   
         The Franc Might Be Devalued only Slightly — Or Not At All   
         Conditions for Success of the “Devaluation-then-Secession” Approach   
         The Urgency   
         The Political Consequences   
     Conclusion
     Appendix I. The French Banking Cartel   
     Appendix II. “The Euro, an Opportunity for France, an Opportunity for Europe” -- What they were saying then...