Why Germany should dump the euro

Many analysts have been speculating about what would happen if Greece were to leave the euro. But it's not Greece that should be leaving, it's Germany.

A few years ago it wasn't really the thing in mainstream media circles to mention the inherent instability of the euro. And it most certainly wasn't the thing to mention that its inherent instability might lead, in the end, to its collapse.

But by the beginning of last year, as the spreads between the sovereign debt of the likes of Greece and Spain and that of Germany widened, that changed. Greece was occasionally mentioned as a potential problem for ongoing unity although always with the aside that any country leaving the zone was, as John Authers of the FT put it in January 2009, "close to an unthinkable event." It isn't unthinkable any more: for the last few weeks the business pages and blogs have been full of almost nothing else.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.