I’ve said this before, but something that strikes me about the “euro” woes every time I travel abroad these days is the extent to which currency union seems like a quaint and outdated concept. Until relatively recently, the ability to use the same coins and little scraps of paper in France as you use in Germany had some very clear convenience advantages. But thanks to ATMs, credit/debit cards, and online banking there’s very little upside. Normal people carry very little cash on them, do most things with cards, and as long as the ATMs in the country you’re in all spit out the correct local currency, everything is fine.
In the modern day, the three-hour time difference between DC and Los Angeles is a bigger deal than the fact that Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Zurich all use different currencies.
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