Eurocurrency Assignment - 3 pts - 3 typed double-spaced pages maximum - submitted as email attachment (Word or Wordperfect format)

As an member of the your corporation’s Treasury Dept., you have been asked to compose a 3-page paper on the operations impact of the introduction of the Euro on Jan. 1, 1999.  Management wants an overview of the possible costs/benefits and how it will impact treasury operations.

OP-ed from NY Times

When leaders of the European Union meet on the first weekend in May to decide which of their countries qualify to start phasing in a common currency in 1999, they will be making a monumental political decision as well as a monetary one.

Politically, creating a common currency could have far-reaching consequences, either putting  Europe on the road to becoming a superstate on a par with the United States or blocking closer  unity by widening existing European national divisions.

 Until now, all European politics has been national, even the elections every five years to the  European Parliament, whose members are virtually all political obscurities. The decisions that really count, about foreign and security policy, taxation and government spending, have always been  made in London, Paris, Bonn and other national capitals, not in the European Union headquarters at
Brussels.

Next Jan. 1, however, the countries that qualify to start using the new currency, the euro, will surrender to an independent European Central Bank based in Frankfurt a basic power of national sovereignty -- to issue and regulate legal tender.

The new euros will not actually start jingling in people's pockets until three years later. But just as  the creation of the Bank of the United States in 1791 reinforced the power of the Federal Government and led to long, bitter political battles over states' rights, the impending arrival of the euro has been seen, particularly by its opponents, as a key step down the road to a centralized European state.