Peter Navarro, who heads the US president’s new National Trade Council, described the single currency as an “implicit Deutsche Mark” that gave Germany a competitive advantage over its trade partners.
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“A big obstacle to viewing TTIP as a bilateral deal is Germany, which continues to exploit other countries in the EU as well as the US with an ‘implicit Deutsche Mark’ that is grossly undervalued,” Mr Navarro said.
“The German structural imbalance in trade with the rest of the EU and the US underscores the economic heterogeneity within the EU — ergo, this is a multilateral deal in bilateral dress.””
Technically speaking this is correct, though the accusation implies Germany somehow set this system up intentionally. The problem for that accusation is Germany’s actions show exact the opposite of intent: it is instead always trying to impose monetary and fiscal rigor on the rest of the Eurozone, not encouraging profligacy (indeed, to an unrealistic extent). Of course, you can argue that Germany is playing a double game, advocating for fidelity that it knows Europe’s “problem” countries can’t live up to, while at the same time preventing them from leaving the Eurozone, so as to actually weaken the Euro while appearing to want it to be strong… but that theory seems iffy to us, given the massive ongoing conflict over this issue within Europe.