Has the euro been a disaster, or what? It seems pretty self-evident that it has been. Unemployment is 27.6 percent in Greece, 26.2 percent in Spain, 16.5 percent in Portugal, and 13.6 percent in Ireland, which, remember, is supposed to be the austerity success story. What’s happened? Well, exactly what euro-skeptics feared would happen from the time the common currency was just an idea: a shock hit some parts of Europe worse than others, and there hasn’t been any easy way to adjust. The ECB’s one-size-fits-Germany policy has left crisis countries no choice but to try to pay-cut their way to prosperity which would be painful enough if it were even possible. But it’s really not when interest rates are all but at zero. The euro has turned a recession into a depression. Countries can’t devalue their currency or cut interest rates or even run bigger deficits when they get into trouble, so their trouble gets worse. It goes against all intuition that a less flexible monetary would work as well as a more flexible one during a global financial crisis….and against all evidence too. Fixed exchange rates work until they don’t. But when they don’t, they really don’t, like the Great Depression ‘don’t’! So it would be strange to say the gold standard had worked as well as other monetary regimes if you just disregard the 1930s. It’s equally strange to say fixed exchange rates are working today if you just disregard the countries where they aren’t. Because there are plenty of those. Half a continent of them, in fact!