From Madrid to California Experiences of a virtual international student in the time of pandemic
At 3 a.m. on Mondays, Mariano Vargas López zooms in from his native Madrid to one of his classes at CSUMB. | Photo by Mariano Vargas López
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Translation by Claudia Meléndez Salinas
When you hear about California, you think of Los Ángeles or San Francisco. Perhaps the tech-savvy think of Silicon Valley. I dreamed of visiting those places when I was offered the possibility of moving from Madrid to Monterey Bay to study. Then the pandemic hit and my plans went down the drain.
by Philipp Bagus via Mises
Twenty-five years ago, on December 15, 1995, the fifteen heads of state and government of the then EU decided at a council meeting in Madrid to name the future common currency the “euro” and to introduce it from January 1, 1999, initially as a book currency at a fixed exchange rate. The actual introduction of cash took place in 2002. Denmark, Great Britain, and Sweden, however, retained their national currencies and still do today.
Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, which joined in 2004, also stubbornly resisted giving up the złoty, koruna, and forint for the euro. From the beginning, there were two competing views on what kind of fiat currency the European Central Bank’s (ECB) money should be.1 The euro was sold to a skeptical German public as the successor to the Deutsche mark. The common currency was not to be used to directly finance government budgets. Many Germans feared that they would have to pay for the high debts of the souther