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With the begin­ning of 1999, the Euro came into being as the cur­rency for much of con­ti­nen­tal Europe. This event took place as the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a global eco­nomic col­lapse con­tin­ued to loom large. In this pro­gram, a num­ber of aspects of global eco­nomic and polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions are ana­lyzed, draw­ing heav­ily on arti­cles and analy­ses from The Finan­cial Times of Lon­don. After dis­cus­sion of how the Fed­eral Reserve nar­rowly averted a finan­cial col­lapse in 1998, the broad­cast focuses on the unsta­ble state of the world econ­omy. Russ­ian debt default, Brazil­ian eco­nomic insta­bil­ity, the role of cur­rency spec­u­la­tors and the role of IMF are among the fac­tors ana­lyzed. Most impor­tantly, the pro­gram dis­cusses the strong sta­tus of the Euro and the vir­tual cer­tainty that it will sig­nif­i­cantly chal­lenge the dol­lar as the reserve cur­rency of choice — an event that poses a grave threat to the econ­omy of the United States. Key Finan­cial Times arti­cles read into the record in this broad­cast high­light the prob­a­bil­ity that cur­rency spec­u­la­tion between the dol­lar and the Euro may prove extremely attrac­tive to investors and dev­as­tat­ing to the Amer­i­can and global eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion. There is a strong pos­si­bil­ity that the U.S. econ­omy and cur­rency may be vul­ner­a­ble to the same type of spec­u­la­tive forces that dev­as­tated Asia in 1997–98. A key point of analy­sis notes that the tran­si­tion from the pound to the dol­lar as the world’s main cur­rency in the after­math of the first World War was one major fac­tor that pre­cip­i­tated the Great Depres­sion. Much of the broad­cast reviews mate­r­ial ana­lyz­ing the EMU as the real­iza­tion of the pro­posal of Pan-German the­o­reti­cian Friedrich List. In the 1840s, List pro­posed a Euro­pean eco­nomic union, dom­i­nated by Ger­many, as a vehi­cle for Ger­man world dom­i­na­tion. (Recorded in Jan­u­ary of 1999.)