How do you leave the euro?

A few weeks ago, Lord Wolfson announced a £250,000 prize for the person who could figure out how a country could leave the eurozone. Given what is happening to the euro, it seemed an awful lot of money to spend on a sub-section of the real question: namely, how Europe can maintain monetary stability and promote growth. The euro, as Gideon Rachman pointed out in the FT last week, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. 

It seems Lord Wolfson agrees that he asked too narrow a question and has reformulated the task. The winner will now have to answer what will be the best way of ejection from the Euro ‘to be managed to provide the soundest foundation for the future growth and prosperity of the current membership?’ Much better.

The jury for the Wolfson Prize has also been recruited. It will be chaired by Derek Scott, former Economic Adviser to Tony Blair, and consist of: Professor Jean-Jacques Rosa, a member of former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s Conseil d’Analyse Économique; Professor Charles Goodhart, a leading British economist and a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee; Professor Francesco Giavazzi from Bocconi University; and, to reassure the Germans, Professor Doctor Manfred J.