Loans to Ireland Bill

I am very happy to give, I hope, a very unambiguous answer to that as well. I do not believe that there is any virtue in the fluctuation of exchange rates. I believe that exchange rate markets, like other asset markets, fluctuate quite irrationally. They swing far too far, an enormous amount of damage is created, they are never at the theoretical point of equilibrium which some people read about in their textbooks 50 years ago and enormous economic costs are caused by these fluctuations. If you can replace them with a stable currency system, as we did before 1914 with gold, as the eurozone has done, as the United States has done with the dollar and so forth, that is a very good idea, all other things being equal. We can get into the ““all other things being equal”” on another occasion perhaps. I think that if you take the long 20-year view, Greece, Ireland and Spain have all benefited enormously from their membership of the European Union and the eurozone, and that will continue to be the case. We now have a momentary crisis, which looks very grim at present, but we should not throw the baby out with the bath-water.