Netherlands, Germany Have Euro Disaster Plan – Possible Return to Guilder and Mark

When asked about Germany, Dijsselbloem said he couldn’t say whether that country’s government had made similar preparations.

German Silver Deutsche Mark – (1951-1974)
However, Jan Kees de Jager, finance minister from February 2010 to November 2012, acknowledged that a team of legal experts, economists and foreign affairs specialists often met at his ministry on Fridays to discuss possible scenarios.
‘The fact that in Europe multiple scenarios were discussed was something some countries found rather scary. They did not do that at all, strikingly enough’, said De Jager in the TV documentary.
‘We were one of the few countries, together with Germany. We even had a team together that discussed scenarios, Germany-Netherlands.’
When the EU Observer requested confirmation from Germany, the German ministry of finance did not officially deny that it had drawn up similar plans, stating simply: ‘We and our partners in the euro zone, including the Netherlands, were and still are determined to do everything possible to prevent a breakup of the eurozone.’
This is quite a revelation. At that time the German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble had said that the Euro could survive without Greece. Whether it could survive without the Dutch is another matter entirely.
A Euro without Holland and especially Germany is currently inconceivable. De Jager also states that other countries found the prospect of a Euro break-up frightening. So much so that they buried their heads in the sand rather than deal with the situation facing them. It appears that no emergency contingency plans were made in the unfortunately named PIIGS nations – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.
One has to wonder if the plans would have been made public had a TV documentary not forced the Dutch government to confirm the claim.
It is interesting to note that it is these two countries, Germany and Netherlands, whose citizens have also been at the forefront of the gold repatriation movement currently sweeping across Europe – France’s second largest party entered the fray this week.
In a climate with a lack of faith in fiat currencies, any return to a purely fiat guilder or mark would be risky in the absence of the confidence that gold backing provides. Despite the implication that secrecy is no longer necessary because Europe is over the worst we believe the Dutch repatriation of 20% of it’s sovereign gold from the U. S. indicates that the Dutch are still, wisely, preparing for the worst – whether that be a euro crisis or indeed a dollar crisis and an international monetary crisis.

This post was published at Gold Core on 28 November 2014.