https://mises.org/wire/world-needs-gold-backed-deutsche-mark
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The opportunity for France to eliminate the DM and gain some control over the German economy arose after the fall of the Soviet Union and the government of its puppet state East Germany in the early 1990s. Germans on both sides of the now torn-down Berlin Wall desired to reunite their country politically. Eschewing force majeure, Germany sought the approval of the US, France, and the UK to reunite. In a still controversial and not universally accepted scenario—see this report from Spiegel International—France let it be known that it would give approval to a reunited Germany only if West Germany scrapped the DM and used the euro. German central bankers may actually have thought that they could prevail to make the euro a super-DM. They quickly learned otherwise as they were outvoted at key policy debates, and they watched helplessly as the European Central Bank violated the terms of its charter not to inflate the euro or to support the debt obligations of its members.
Reinstating the Deutsche Mark Would Be Good for Both Germany and the World
The decision to leave the inflationist eurozone is a political decision only. There is nothing in economic science that would prevent Germany from doing so and even adopting a gold standard. As explained by Ludwig von Mises in chapter eleven of Omnipotent Government:
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Germany is being plundered economically and financially by mostly southern European countries, as we can see in this time series of the Trans-European Automated Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System (TARGET2).1 TARGET2 records the claims and liabilities of the ECB and national central banks against the Eurosystem. A country’s TARGET2 balance is affected by its surpluses/deficits in (i) the current account, (ii) the financial account, and/or (iii) the capital account. It is reminiscent of a swap line operation or a change in foreign reserves under a fixed exchange rate arrangement:
[Blockierte Grafik: https://cdn.mises.org/styles/max_full/s3/target2_graph_-_ecb_data.jpg?itok=nxyiqb9l]
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