Here are a few EURO failure predictions from the last few months. They are offered up by some of those that are considered 'credible' by y2k activists.... How well did they project the outcome? I am preparing for problems, but it's necessary to keep a balanced perspective. R.A. Mann

(note- all exerpts are from North's site).

TECH WEB NEWS (Feb. 24). exerpts-

Organizations face "certain muddle and possible disaster" if the creation of a pan-European currency is not delayed from its scheduled date of Jan. 1, 1999, according to Robin Guenier, head of Taskforce 2000, in an article to be published next month.

On average, only 11 percent of small to medium-sized businesses in the European Union have acted on the IT implications of introducing the Euro, according to a report published earlier this month by the U.K. branch of accountancy Grant Thornton.

The European Monetary Union is going to cause chaos at the beginning of next year, and the millennium problem will cause an even bigger problem at the beginning of 2000, Bennett said (Martha Bennett of Giga ).

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11-98 North comment: The Ticking Clock on The Euro: No Way to Meet the Deadline

The Eurocrats have bet the survival of Europe on this pipe dream. The bankers have refused to allocate programming resources to y2k because the software revisions demanded by the Euro could not be met if programmers worked on y2k.

Result: Europe will miss both deadlines.

The deadline is fixed: Jan. 1, 1999. It has been trumpeted for years. It has been fundamental to one of the great public relations campaigns of all time. But Europe will not make this deadline. The world will know on Jan. 4.

What you must pay attention to after January 4 is the back-peddling, the excuses for failure, the redoubled efforts to impose the new software, and the delay of y2k repairs in the name of the Euro, which will be dead on arrival.

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12-98 Capers Jones' Estimates on U.S. Y2K/Eurocurrency Failures

Capers Jones offers estimates of failures. His guesses are more precise than anyone else's. The worse y2k is, the less able we will be to assess the accuracy of his assessments. The data collectors will be out of work.

He thinks there will be 2 million applications that will not be fixed in time. 500,000 Eurocurrency applications will not be fixed in time. There will be 300,000 combined y2k/Euro applications that will not be fixed in time.

-- R.A. Mann (ramann@hotmail.com), January 05, 1999

Answers

One would have to say it is a bit early to be certain of what problems will develop. Still, problems on the order of what was predicted by GN, Jones et al would certainly have been obvious in the first hour or two. So they were wrong in their estimates by at least an order of magnitude.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), January 05, 1999.

Paul, I don't necessarily buy this just yet, let clearing and settlement do it's job, wait for fallout in the next month or two. So far it *looks* good.

Has it also occured to you that the y2k predictions might also be out by an order of magnitude?

By that I mean an increased order of magnitude.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 06, 1999.

Not a Gary North fan, I think his tendency to overstatement is aptly illustrated by his "The world will know on Jan. 4."

C'mon, Gary. It's not that black-and-white, nor are the software changes for the euro as likely to produce immediately obvious errors as uncorrected Y2k bugs.

Since I haven't followed GN closely, I need to ask: How much euro expertise has he claimed or implied? Does he present evidence of having investigated and analyzed euro conversion as thoroughly as he has Y2k?

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), January 06, 1999.

Which leads me to the obvious conclusion.........Eurokay, I'm Okay.

-- Craig (craig@ccinet.ab.ca), January 06, 1999.