Word: euros
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Continental Europe, an additional factor feeds the disgruntlement: the euro, which 13 European Union countries have now adopted as their official currency since it was first launched on Jan. 1, 2002. From Madrid to Maastricht, it has become conventional wisdom that the introduction of the single currency jacked up prices. At the entrance gate of Volkswagen's main plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, Ulf Meinecke, 38, shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and says he can no longer afford annual vacations to Italy with his family. "We just go every other year," he says. "Everything is getting more expensive...
That sort of talk gives heartburn to E.U. officials and statisticians across Europe because they say it's largely unfounded. Indeed, since 2002, inflation has been rising faster in Britain, which kept its own currency, than in countries that switched to the euro. True, the cost of some everyday items has gone up, at times quite sharply. The German statistics office, for example, has calculated that, since 2000, the price of a man's haircut has risen 7%, a breakfast roll is up 13% while tram tickets are 17% more costly. In France, a cup of coffee...
...economists, psychologists and other experts, the gulf between the public belief in Europe that the euro has sent prices up and official statistics that show it hasn't is providing a rich new area of research, inspring dozens of learned papers with titles such as "Expectancy Confirmation in Spite of Disconfirming Evidence...
That, though, is starting to change. Bulgaria doesn't move to the euro until 2010, but the country is already seeing the effects of integration with the European economy. The Sofia Echo, an English-language weekly, reports that in the last few months of 2006, the price of bread went up more than 10% and is expected to increase another 20% to 50% this year. The evolving landscape is perhaps nowhere better observed than at the gleaming new glass-wrapped Mall of Sofia, where locals sip $2.60 caramel macchiatos, browse stores such as Lacoste and Hugo Boss and take...
London's pre-eminence wasn't guaranteed by the Big Bang, however. More recently, the U.K.'s decision to opt out of the euro in the early '90s stoked concern that Frankfurt - now home to the European Central Bank - would eclipse the City as Europe's leading financial center. Those concerns have gone the way of the franc, lira and deutsche mark. Thanks to London's ability to exploit its long-standing expertise in marketmaking and English's position as one of Europe's primary languages, there are now more euros traded for dollars, pounds and yen each...