EC CALLS FOR Euro to RIVAL GREENBACK

Jean-claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, has called on the European Union to champion the euro as a global currency to rival the dollar and demanded more powers for Brussels to flex its muscles on the world stage.

In his annual flagship speech, the president also said EU governments should lose their individual veto over tax laws from Brussels.

Instead, legislation should be passed by a qualified majority vote, a system where votes are weighted according to countries’ sizes and populations.

Previous commission efforts to introduce a financial transaction tax across the EU were scuppered by a lack of unanimous support from member states.

“We must do more to allow our single currency to play its full role on the international scene,” Juncker said. “It is absurd that Europe pays for 80 per cent of its energy import bill — worth euros 300 billion a year — in U.S. dollars when only roughly two per cent of our energy imports come from the United States.

“It is absurd that European companies buy European planes in dollars instead of the euro,” he said. “The euro must become the face and the instrument of a new, more sovereign Europe”.

However, the U.S. dollar was highly unlikely to face any meaningful challenge from the euro in the near future, economists warned.

The eurozone sovereign debt crisis of 2012 and further political challenges make the currency far less attractive than dollars for central banks’ reserves and international invoicing, said Marchel Alexandrovich of Jefferies.

“The whole point is you want to use the currency that you know is going to be around in two years’ time, in 20 years’ time.”