The creation of the euro as seen by Charles Gave

In his recent book, La vérité vous rend libre, the French financier devotes a chapter to the reasons he believes led to the creation of a single European currency.

Charles Gave's hypothesis is as follows: «the creation of the euro was not intended to foster European political integration», as the official version has it, «but to return to the United States the part of monetary sovereignty that the Bundesbank [the German central bank] had wrested from them in 1971».

That year, the Americans (under Nixon) had decided to decouple the dollar from the gold standard, making dollar interest rates highly volatile. Faced with this uncertainty, savers were prompted to adopt the Deutsche Mark as their reserve currency, since the Bundesbank, for institutional reasons, was known as the "Deutsche Mark".