By Matt Steinglass in Amsterdam
Safaripark Beekse Bergen, near the Dutch town of Tilburg, boasts nine lions, 13 giraffes and a herd of almost 30 zebra. But this month the theme park reported sightings of an even more remarkable beast – a previously extinct specie, the Dutch guilder.
Thousands of guilders flooded into the park?s cash registers after it announced it would accept the former national currency for one weekend, in a promotion tied to the European Council summit earlier this month. At the ticket booth, thrifty locals dug into their coats to produce faded Fl 10 bills and jingling coins.
The guilder sale was a ?comical stunt? to take advantage of the commotion around the euro, said a spokeswoman for the safari park?s parent company, Libema. But the promotion also tapped into the Dutch public?s widespread disillusionment with the euro and nostalgia for their old currency.
?My general feeling about the euro is, how soon can we get rid of it? It?s been nothing but trouble,? said Loek ten Bosch, an electrical engineer who had just paid for his ticket with plastic bags full of coins he had found around the house.
To sweeten the deal, the park set a rate of one guilder to one euro, a large premium over its pre-2002 value of 0.45 euros, and an even larger one given that the guilder is officially worthless. The one-for-one guilder-euro swap alluded to a common Dutch complaint: that, since the euro?s introduction, everything that once cost a guilder now costs a euro.
?Everything got much more expensive as soon as the euro came in,? said Marijke van Laarhoven, who had scraped together about Fl 7 of old bills and coins. ?The guilder was much better. I don?t think the euro is going to survive.?
About half of the Netherlands appears to agree with her. In surveys conducted by pollster Maurice de Hond following the December 8-9 summit, 50 per cent of Dutch agreed with the statement: ?We never should have joined the euro?, against 47 per cent who disagreed. Fifty-six per cent said they thought European leaders would fail to solve the crisis.
That lack of confidence in the euro is exacerbating a worsening economic situation. On Tuesday the Dutch Central Planning Bureau (CPB) said the Netherlands? economy was already in a recession, and that it expected gross domestic product to shrink 0.5 per cent in 2012.
The CPB said it expected unemployment, currently among the lowest in Europe at just over 4 per cent, to rise above 5 per cent next year. The government?s budget deficit will be higher than 4 per cent of GDP, possibly triggering a new round of budget cuts.
?For this moment it is uncertainty that mostly determines the European economies,? the CPB said, forecasting that the European economy as a whole would slip into recession.
?Of course lack of trust in the euro is affecting confidence,? said Harald Benink, a professor of finance at the University of Tilburg. ?People are starting to save more and spend less.?
? The Financial Times Limited 2011