New D-mark could be twice as strong

(MarketWatch) — Several years before the creation of the European single currency in 1999, David Cobbold, a London foreign-exchange expert and son of the illustrious 1960s Bank of England governor Lord Cobbold, put forward a novel suggestion for the name of the new European unit of account.

Rather than the euro, Lord Cobbold junior recommended that the new currency should be called the Doppelmark, to be introduced at the rate of 2 Deutsche marks — with the name reminding Germans and others of the essential link between the new European money and its forebear, the German mark.

Scroll forward a decade and a half, and we see that the idea has come back into vogue again. As part of Franco-German saber-rattling over the future of economic and monetary union (EMU), senior Frenchmen are saying that, if by some mischance the euro were to unravel, the Germans would be forced to live with a new currency that would be double the value of the present one — a new form of Doppelmark, and one that would be intensely prejudicial to German exports. (more)