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WHEN you read military history, you find that the timing of great victories and surrenders was often a big surprise to the winners. The U.S. Army was planning for a huge offensive against the Kaiser that was to be launched in 1919. Informed people believed the conquest of Japan would take place sometime in 1946. Defense Department war plans and budgets drawn up in the late Eighties confidently projected a continued Soviet threat throughout the Nineties.

As the faithful Gekko reader will know, I believe the launch of the Euro—the proposed single European currency—would be a disaster for the participants, and a threat to world trade and financial stability. I had come to think that the struggle against this creature was going to drag on until well into the next century. Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac had thrown up impressive political Siegfried and Maginot Lines in defense of European Monetary Union. “Convergence trades,” or bets by my speculator friends that the policies imposed by the Maastricht Treaty to get the Euro going would drive all interest rates together, had rewarded the believers. As late as last month, I actually had an Italian supporter of the Euro laugh in my face at the suggestion that a delay or cancellation was possible.

JD

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John Dizard

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WHEN you read military history, you find that the timing of great victories and surrenders was often a big surprise to the winners. The U.S. Army was planning for a huge offensive against the Kaiser that was to be launched in 1919. Informed people believed the conquest of Japan would take place sometime in 1946. Defense Department war plans and budgets drawn up in the late Eighties confidently projected a continued Soviet threat throughout the Nineties.

As the faithful Gekko reader will know, I believe the launch of the Euro—the proposed single European currency—would be a disaster for the participants, and a threat to world trade and financial stability. I had come to think that the struggle against this creature was going to drag on until well into the next century. Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac had thrown up impressive political Siegfried and Maginot Lines in defense of European Monetary Union. “Convergence trades,” or bets by my speculator friends that the policies imposed by the Maastricht Treaty to get the Euro going would drive all interest rates together, had rewarded the believers. As late as last month, I actually had an Italian supporter of the Euro laugh in my face at the suggestion that a delay or cancellation was possible.