Wolf:
Euro has been good in may aspects like employment, and interest rates. It's amazing the riches it has brought, and it's responsible of the good part of the economical situation nowadays, the bad being due to PP. But PP has made a good marketing campaign, making people believe that the good brought by the EURO, that PSOE brought, is their work.
Inflation is always bad. But inflation is out there by now, it's only that statistics don't take into account the bigger rise (real state) which poderates a lot. Thus, if the rest of the parameters (the ones they input in the consumer basket) go up close to the real inflation, close to the flats price rise, people will see clearly they are losing purchase power and press the Unions for higher rises in salaries, and, thus, the yearly 6% impoverishment will end.
This 6% has taken Spain to gap salaries/prices you and other members are so surprised of.
Unfortunately, I don't know why, not because of productivity, nor infrastructure, maybe because of national control direct or indirect (through banks industrial participations), it seems that investments tend to go to Northern Europe, so, having half the salary of a german is the only way to preserve our jobs. A minor evil.
But prices used to be lesser too! And they are except for housing, after 7 years of sPPculators.
Guess who's controlling the Euro?
As far as the dollar versus the Euro, that's all relative to what you feel is essential. To the vast majority of people under the dollar, Europe is no longer a choice destination for vacation travel because of the lack of strength in our money. In the end, Europe suffers from it as much as we do.
Wolf, I know from long ago that the only ones who controll dollar are the USA. Euro is not going up, it's dollar that's going down, since ALL the currencies are going up against it. The USA is letting, through contradictory declarations and policies, the gas escape from the inflated dollar, helped by the commerce exchange deficit, precisely to reduce it and protect their economy and workplaces through exchange rate.
I knew that, but now I have seen this been published by many experts in many newspapers. It's one of the things they use to hide from the public untis someone is able to expose it, and then everybody echoes.
The tourism from the USA in Spain is only about a 1% if I am not wrong, and it's about an 80% or 90% at least from the EU, so Euro is not affecting the tourism sector. I guess last summer we had similar number of visitors to others, even with the 11-M bombing.