| Nobody is seriously talking about leaving the Euro... Primarily because the internal impact could be crushing. Large export industries would benefit, but private citizens would stand to lose greatly and in unpredictable ways. Finns have quite a lot of housing debt, and spend a disproportionate amount of their income on housing compared to most other European countries. That debt load could become a huge problem for people when their salaries are converted to a new local currency but the debt remains. If I have a 300k EUR mortgage, what happens to it? If it remains EUR-denominated while my salary is converted into a reborn FIM currency which then depreciates by 30%, suddenly my debt has effectively become 30% larger too. (Alternatively, if the debts were converted to FIM, the lender banks will still have a lot of EUR liabilities. Could they swallow that? One of the large banks, Nordea, isn't even Finnish. How could the government force a Swedish bank to convert loans into another currency?) At the same time, the interest rate on those debts would skyrocket: right now it's close to zero, but an independent Finnish central bank would probably have to raise rates by multiple percentage points at once. This combination would destroy many families' finances. Any government that did this would get a very negative windfall in the next election. A "FinEuroExit" would be a huge transfer of money and future income from private citizens' pockets to the country's existing established big industries which have been unable to compete in a global market on their own. That doesn't sound like the kind of thing a modern government should be contemplating as their first choice. |