Sauli says, ‘get over it’.
How about you and your minions get over trying to ram rod your EU-ophile statism down our throats, how about that Sauli? you jerk. What he’s saying is, screw Finnish sovereignty forever, we geniuses and masterminds know better than the simpletons of the countryside.
President says “get over it” to nostalgia for Finnish mark
President Sauli Niinistö dismissed defenders of the former Finnish currency, the “markka” Friday, saying that it was pointless to indulge in nostalgia for the currency. In an interview published in the business daily Talouselämä, Niinistö said that even with the power to lower the exchange rate, keeping the mark would have meant that the country would have had a great deal of very expensive euro-denominated debt.
The President offered his words of caution to commentators swept up by nostalgia for the past when Finland had its own currency and could independently decide on monetary and fiscal policy measures to help kick-start a sagging economy.
Having the Finnish mark and the corresponding ability to devalue the currency would not have helped the country out of the current economic morass, he said.
“In the 1990s devaluation did indeed increase competitiveness 30 percent within one year. But no one seems to remember that all consumers paid for that and that it was especially hard on small business owners, who had begun to borrow in foreign currencies for the first time,” Niinistö recalled.
Niinistö pointed out that if Finland still had its own currency, it would not bring the benefits that many now imagine.
“If we still had the mark it would not have saved Nokia or the forestry industry. We would most likely be in a stew, and we would most certainly have had a huge amount of euro-denominated debt, which would have been extremely expensive to pay back in marks,” he commented.
NOTE: There are host of other measures that can be employed, beside devaluation of the currency, if a country is in control of its own monetary policy, such as the lowering and raising of interest rates, something which Finland, nor any other EU member state can do unilaterally.
