Nuisance Monies

On the issue of monetary policy, Macarena –loathing the verb to lose-- has always been a sucker for the winners. In Spain, some years back, she was scolded for a girlish delight at the prospect of finally burying the Peseta and leaving monetary policy where it should be: Frankfurt-types with no sense of humor. They had a 60-odd year winning streak, period.
Partly because of the 1992-93 mayhem all over Europe, partly because of the sequence of “financial crises” in the emerging markets the rest of the decade, and partly because of some good looking jerk working at Banco de España´s research service, she thinks the euro is the best thing that has happened to Spain in decades.
Simply put, there are just too many (180 or so) useless little nuisance-monies roaming around, annoying as those dreadful little toy dogs rich ladies carry around. Except that nuisance-currencies´ bark sometimes wreak havoc.
National money is supposed to be "good for the country". As we are reminded in a delightful recent article, in Latin America, to take one example, the presumed benefit stemming from ANY of the many national moneys moving around, does not even come close to making up for the cost of enduring, year in and year out, interest rates that typically exceed by 500 basis points or more what they would be under full dollarization.