FEBRUARY 1999 BROADSHEET - European Logistics and the Euro

We had an extremely full audience for our EURO high spot on Thursday 28th January at the St John's Innovation Centre. Three speakers tussled with the premise:

"The Euro - Delight or Disaster"

and after one and a half hours of rhetoric a show of hands pointed firmly to the disaster end of the scale. Was this a true volte-face for the Club, with its European unification aims, or just a farce vote!

The evening started with a well balanced talk by Nigel Winmill, the Head of EMU Programme at NatWest in Throgmorton Avenue, London. He put both sides of the case, basically the loss of influence and inward investment if we don't and the loss of sovreignty if we do. In true banking tradition he was preparing NatWest for all eventualities. They are all set for the € which is being used by the giants eg. Siemens, BMW and British Steel already and this in turn is putting pressure on their suppliers and passing the risks down the supply chain. Message: be prepared it's going to happen sometime.

Next came our member Roy Cuthhert who runs Webtee, a hydraulics components manufacturer in St Ives. He is already in the thick of a juggling act, desperately trying to find ways of reducing the high cost of holding at least three different currency reserves to smooth out exchange rate oscillations. If the € is inevitable please may it come soon, is his cri de coeur. If interest rates are going to be set by a bank anyway, and not the politicians, does it matter which? Roy's over-riding concern was the Treaty of Rome's aim of peaceful coexistence between the nations of Western Europe

Next came our member Roy Cuthhert who runs Webtee, a hydraulics components manufacturer in St Ives. He is already in the thick of a juggling act, desperately trying to find ways of reducing the high cost of holding at least three different currency reserves to smooth out exchange rate oscillations. If the € is inevitable please may it come soon, is his cri de coeur. If interest rates are going to be set by a bank anyway, and not the politicians, does it matter which? Roy's over-riding concern was the Treaty of Rome's aim of peaceful coexistence between the nations of Western Europe

Our heavy-weight and most convincing final speaker was Graeme Leach, Chief Economist of the Institute of Directors, who also came up from London, Pall Mall. His argument was that all the european countries were very different, and Britain is the most different of all! He foresaw immense tensions between the northern hard currency countries and the Mediterranean soft currency. The latter desperately anxious to get into a hard currency zone, whilst the former will be heading for fascist unrest. The more you understood the arguments the more skeptical you became he maintained, and quoting all the famous economists from Keynes onwards, forecast trouble ahead. He said there will be a very long settling down period and it will be decades before the unrest due to high unemployment and national tensions subside. Perhaps it will happen eventually, but the € will be anything but a catalyst for peace in our time. Needless to say, after such an impassioned speech, the vote went heavily against the €.

Contact numbers:-

We are grateful to our committee member Valerie Dring for organising this exhilarating meeting. It was interesting to find that NatWest still had to use the letters EUR to prefix Euro currency. They hadn't discovered how to print the €. Well here's how - for Word. Call up the following Microsoft web site: www.eu.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm and download w95euro.exe. After you have executed this file it gives you the € sign when you key in Alt+0128 on the NumPad.

Don't forget to surf in on our web site occasionally. Ideally we could announce all our events and get our feedback that way, but like the € that's probably a long way off for us. However give it a whirl and if you have any suggestions for improvement or want to add a link to your web site you're only an e-mail away.

The Club is very fortunate in benefiting from the sponsorship of the following organisations:-

NatWest St John's Innovation CentreTWI Webtec

There are also other companies who give us generous help with specific meetings and services.

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