>Greater economic and political integration can make the inflation cost of a currency union smaller, but it probably can't make it go away entirely.

A currency union governed as is the current practice within the euro-zone is likely to impose a debt-deflation spiral cost that could make everything go away. The only countries that have any recent experience of real deflation are those that have been the beneficiaries of the IMF's policies following IMF largess, now imitated inside the euro-zone for Greece, Ireland and Latvia. Given political realities, a debt-deflation spiral may be the only way the massive bad debt now mingled into the financial system will be written down.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."