The euro zone crisis has been a piece of luck for Britain. Imagine what would have happened without it.

In the immediate aftermath of Lehman, Britain’s position looked utterly hopeless. With a budget deficit of world-war proportions, and facing the cost of refinancing what had been two of the world’s biggest banks and were now two of the world’s biggest bankruptcies, the future for us at the end of 2008 looked dire.

You will often have heard it said that the euro zone cannot ultimately survive without fiscal union. This is complete nonsense. The truth is that, even with a full fiscal union, it cannot survive – at least, not with any form of fiscal union that one can imagine all the members signing up to.

This may be culturally difficult for Germans to understand. It is not that they lack experience of the problems of controlling spending by sub-central governments, because German Lander certainly do get into financial difficulties – three or four are virtually bankrupt at the moment, including the City of Berlin, no less. The problem is that this experience is not relevant to the euro zone for two very important reasons.

Dear Mark Carney,

As you arrive in your new office, you will not be short of free advice, least of all from economists. Nonetheless, like a supporter of the away team valiantly trying to make himself heard above the roar of the home crowd, this is my feeble attempt to compete against the chorus of voices calling for ever more, ever larger doses of QE, ever lower interest rates and even more devaluation of the Pound.

Just say no!

What, after all, has QE achieved?

We can never know for sure what might have happened without it – my colleagues are still arguing about the effects of economic policy in the nineteen-thirties, so we can’t wait for a definitive answer about 2008 and its aftermath – but the evidence in its favour is far from overwhelming, whereas the damage it is doing is plain for all to see, especially in two areas.

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

As we remember the second greatest prime minister of the Twentieth Century, we quite rightly think first of her achievements. There is no need for me to recap those when they are being well covered in the Conservative press. They are best summarised by acknowledging, as some of the left wing press does, that we’re all Thatcherite now, and however much some folk might have their fun dancing on her grave, it’s a bit late now – she won, and their celebrations are in the end a tribute to the strength of the forces she overcame almost single-handed.

On the negative side, it has to be admitted that we are still haunted by her two big failures.

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

The German insistence that depositors in Cyprus must face a haircut marks a new and dangerous stage in the interminable death throes of the euro zone. Up to this point, the one unshakeable principle underlying all the bailouts on both sides of the Atlantic since 2008 had seemed to be that the value of bank deposits was sacrosanct, whether they were explicitly insured or not. Now, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. It will be clear from now on, even to the most naïve investor, that there are no longer any totally safe assets. The principle of caveat emptor applies to bank deposits as much as to second-hand cars or beef-burgers. If even deposit insurance is now conditional, the difference between insured and uninsured deposits is only one of degree of risk. It is amazing how calmly the markets have reacted to the new reality, but it would be foolish in the extreme to rely on their continued insouciance.

There are a number of lessons we can learn from the events of the last fortnight, most of which relate more to Germany than to Cyprus.

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

Budget Day again, and the pressure on Chancellor George Osborne is rising ominously. There is little agreement about what needs to be done, but complete agreement that something has to change because the state of Britain’s economy is simply awful.

Yet just look at the facts in the table below (all the data are taken from Eurostat, the EU’s own statistical agency). For the latest quarter, the UK economy contracted by 0.3 percent – but France’s performance was just as dismal, Germany’s economy shrank by twice as much, as did the euro zone as a whole. Only the USA achieved a significantly better outcome, a dazzling growth rate of zero  – but at least it didn’t shrink. Year-on-year (Y-O-Y, as the pros call it), the picture is even clearer. Britain’s economic growth, a miserable 0.3 percent, was not significantly lower than Germany’s, but better than France’s minus-0.3 percent, or indeed the euro zone as a whole, which was down by 0.9 percent. Only the USA grew to any significant extent – and there are signs that it may now be starting to slow down, even before the impact of the fiscal cliff and the sequester are felt.

By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.

Whenever the question of the future of the euro zone comes up, you can always rely on someone (often a German) to say something like “Yes, of course the Germans don’t like having to foot the bill for the weaklings… but at the same time, they do get enormous benefits from having a fixed exchange rate. I mean, just look at their trade surplus. All those Mercs and BMW’s you see in Milan and Athens and…”

This argument is utter nonsense, and the economists especially ought to know better.

Modern wars have no clear start and no clear end, leaving politicians free to deny their existence when it suits them and to claim victory even in the face of obvious defeat.

The same seems to be true of currency wars, judging by the reports from the meeting of the world’s finance ministers in Moscow, who, according to the FT, asserted that “central banks should not target their exchange rates, but added that monetary easing which had the side-effect of weakening a country’s currency was allowed”. This is a bit like saying that bombing civilians is OK as long as you’re actually aiming at terrorists – which, come to think of it, is more or less what we do say.

In the welter of comment on President Obama’s second term, one remarkable feature seems to have slipped under the radar. This has been a presidency blessedly free of scandal. When last did the White House remain more or less scandal-free for as long as four years? His predecessor, George W., had the average scandal quotient (Halliburton contracts, the Abramoff affair among others). Before him, there was Clinton, who seemed to clock up a scandal a week – we all remember the sex, but there was also Whitewater, which involved money, allegations of graft and ultimately suicide. Under Bush Senior and Reagan we had the Iran contra affair. As for Nixon, the less said the better. Even the saintly Jimmy Carter had a problem brother and some rather loose cannons among the pals he shipped in from Georgia to staff his administration.

What makes Obama’s record all the more remarkable is that he emerged from the mire of the Chicago Democratic Party, a bye-word for corruption for decades past, and in fact the Governor of Illinois was accused of trying to “sell” the new President’s abandoned senate seat only a few weeks after the election. Moreover, you can be quite sure that this administration’s many enemies will have subjected its dealings to the most microscopic scrutiny in search of even the tiniest flaws, misjudgements and personal peccadilloes. It is truly amazing that they have found so few.

You’ve got to admire the endless inventiveness of our politicians. Just when you think there’s nothing new under the sun, they catch you out by coming up with an idea so bad nobody seems to have thought of it before.

Now the All-Party (or was it All-night Party?) Parliamentary Group on Financial Education for Young People has come up with the daftest idea I’ve heard since the previous Government’s idiotic Home Information Pack scheme, but which threatens to do far more serious damage. They propose, in the FT’s words, that “High street banks responsible for some of the worst consumer mis-selling scandals of the past decade will be invited into British schools to help teach financial education”.