It is "totally absurd", "complete nonsense", says Jean-Claude Trichet, who runs the European Central Bank nowadays (after being acquitted on various liberty-threatening charges in his French homeland).
Members of his ECB governing council back him to the hilt.
Chatter about the euro busting apart is ?utter nonsense? according to one of its members, Nout Wellink, and the German deputy finance minister shrugs aside the suggestion that the euro is squeezing German economic growth as ?totally crazy?.
All that has a familiar ring in British ears old enough to remember 1993. It is Norman Lamont all over again rubbishing the remotest possibility that the pound could be driven out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the currency link that developed into the euro.
On that precedent, the break-up of the euro is a better bet than Motivator at 5/2 for tomorrow?s Derby.
Look at the way this started. While the Dutch were still voting on Wednesday, the German magazine Stern ran a report about a secret meeting in Berlin (it was meant to be secret, anyway) called by Hans Eichel, Germany?s finance minister, and attended by the Bundesbank?s top man, Axel Weber.
The agenda: what on earth to do about the wretched euro.
The German finance ministry retorted half-heartedly that Mr Eichel believes ?that monetary union is a success?. Lord Lamont?s Treasury would have denied the meeting ever happened.
In real life, the euro is failing three times over. First, there is the inevitable ?one size fits all? failure. The long-running official interest rate of two per cent leaves, at the two extremes, Germany with worse unemployment than when Hitler came to power, while Spain is riding the crest of a rip-roaring construction boom.
Next, financial markets have noticed that some euro Governments - specifically the Italians - may not necessarily honour their debts like the German Government just because they happen to use the same currency.
Until very recentlyec entl y international bond dealers, mostly Americans, have supposed that the euro is a first cousin of the dollar, a single currency serving a huge economy spread across a continent. Suddenly they have grasped that there is no equivalent of the US Treasury standing behind all euro bonds. They are debts owed by the national governments that issued them. So, euro or no euro, the yields on Italian bonds have risen, their prices have fallen. There is sure to be more of this.
Finally, the euro has been taken as a haven for mobile funds running scared from what looked like a dodgy dollar. It became far too strong for the well-being of German exporters, and some others.
With a little luck this could now right itself.
The euro has been sliding this spring, and with a vengeance this week. Very possibly, rebellious French and Dutch voters have made it possible once again to sell a Mercedes for a sporting price in America.
But that on its own cannot guarantee the survival of a currency without a Government.
