By Thorsten Polleit
The euro, Europe’s single currency, has an economic argument in its favour: It makes sense for people who are closely interconnected through the division of labour and who trade extensively with each other to calculate and conduct business in the same money. This approach is much simpler, less costly, and more transparent—compared to a situation where many different currencies are in use simultaneously. From this perspective, many people might be willing to approve the fact that 11 European states merged their currencies into a single currency, the euro, on January 1, 1999.
Yet at the same time, it was precisely through this decision that political forces managed to achieve a thoroughly sinister goal: namely, to eliminate currency competition in Europe, to force a monopoly on money production into the hands of a supranational institution—the European Central Bank (ECB)—and to impose a single currency on the people —from which there is virtually no escape anymore, a money that has glaring economic and ethical defects.
For the euro is, after all, a fiat money, and such a type of money is known to cause many serious problems. The fiat euro is not only inflationary—meaning it loses purchasing power over time—it also causes causes financial and economic crises. It drives national economies ever deeper into debt, creating something like “debt slavery”. Above all, the euro member countries are living more unrestrainedly than ever on credit. Thanks to the euro, they can expand ever further and unchecked in their interference in people’s economic and social life—at the expense of the freedoms of citizens and entrepreneurs. More and more people are becoming dependent on the euro by entrusting their lifetime savings to the fiat euro currency, and furthermore, a growing number of people earn their living from state handouts and government contracts, financed by ever increasing government debt that the ECB willingly finances with newly created fiat euros.
None of this should seriously surprise anyone, because it is no coincidence, no accident. After all, fiat money is something like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a destroyer of the free economy and society and a diabolical trailblazer toward a regime of unfreedom. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to the fiat euro, but to all fiat currencies.
But the fiat euro is being used in a particularly insidious way: It is meant to serve a cartel of nation-states in their effort to usher in a single centralized state—as the project of the “United States of Europe” is quite openly proclaimed. The whole thing is something like erecting a neo-socialist Tower of Babel.
In Brussels, the euro has so far successfully driven the expansion of the European Union. The fiat euro is now officially used as the currency in 26 nation-states with about 351 million people; at the beginning of 2026, Bulgaria joined, and other countries are on the EU’s expansion wish list.
But now the EU is coming under heavy fire from America: The Trump administration considers it undemocratic and tyrannical, and quite rightly sees in it the embodiment—indeed, the manifestation—of the “globalist ideology” that the MAGA initiative is now seeking to drive out of the United States.
Economic decline, an aging population, and general childlessness, as well as uncontrolled mass immigration, make Europe—from an American perspective—no longer a serious competitor, but rather a case of great concern: one from which Americans expect no high-level performance any more, but which they also do not want to leave entirely to itself alone. The U.S. has an interest in Europe, even if the EU—especially Germany, Great Britain the United Kingdom, and France—has revealed itself as an adversary in the Ukraine-Russia war.
The Trump administration’s anti-EU agenda has now fallen on fertile ground in many EU states, encouraging the still rather restrained opposition forces in those nation-states to reform the EU and even to break themselves free from it. The freedom movement that has been set in motion will presumably not content itself with parametric minor, cosmetic reforms of the EU. Rather, it is about knocking the over-government called the EU out of power.
So what if the EU loses its followers, if literally no state wants anything to do with the EU any more? The answer is clear: The future, the continued existence of the euro would be put into question. If the vision of a European single state evaporates, the economic rationale for a single money in Europe may still exist. But then the consent to leave the single currency to the ECB—a coercive supranational monopolist which de facto is actually beyond any parliamentary control by national voters—comes probably to an end.
Investors in the capital markets will very soon realize that in the next financial crisis—into which a euro states and/or euro commercial banks have maneuvered themselves—the support from other member countries—be it in the form of tax-financed “rescue packages” and/or subscribing to, or guaranteeing, a member state’s liabilities—can no longer be mobilized.
What then remains is the unvarnished monetization of public or bank debt by the ECB, along with the subsidizing of financially mismanaged states and banks with artificially lowered interest rates and euro credit and money supply expansion—in other words: an inflation policy that bleeds dry the people in the still better-performing member countries and drags them into the abyss along with the underperformers.
One would have to be clueless or blinded to expect the fiat euro to remain if the nightmare of the EU single state concept ends up in the dustbin of history. Centrifugal forces that will put the euro through the breaking test are already at work. And it probably won’t be long before the people in the euro area realize that for decades they have elected, advocated, and tolerated policies that will soon bring them a monetary chaos on a grand scale.
What could happen next? The wish for a renationalization of money, or a return to a variety of national fiat currencies, is certainly a politically understandable reaction, but it is anything but economically convincing. The same applies to dollarization, that is European states adopting the U.S. dollar. But there are other options. For instance, converting the euro into gold-backed money is a truly promising, and it could serve as an intermediate step on the way to establishing a free market for money in Europe and thus bringing about the best possible solution to the “money problem.” Whatever the path may look like that is ultimately initiated with the collapse of the EU paradigm and its enforcer in the form of the fiat euro: The purchasing power of the fiat euro will be crushed; and whoever has eyes to see and ears to hear had better start escaping the fiat euro.
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