Yet, faced with apparently fudged criteria and the inclusion of Italy, the European Central Bank might then choose to follow a tighter monetary policy, making the new currency harder, not softer.
Mr. Brown says Iran's plunging currency has made it harder for customers to pay.
Rather than making adjustment harder, he says, the currency peg was essential for credibility.
And share prices have dropped considerably since 2006, which makes it harder to use stock as a currency than in the past.
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And, as the referendum on the single currency approaches, the real differences between the United Kingdom and euroland may make it harder to persuade the British public to sign up to the single currency.
Argentina's notoriously intransigent unions were always likely to make it harder to get good results from a fixed currency.
People trying to profit via the bitcoin electronic currency will soon have to work harder to mint the digital coins.
Moreover, Malaysia's sweeping new capital controls will impede trade, because they make it harder for importers to get hold of foreign currency.
Through currency rates, it makes it harder for those nations to sell their wares because their money goes up in value when U.S. greenbacks come rushing in.
Indeed, Brazil's currency regime may have made much-needed fiscal adjustment harder: now that Brazilians have conquered inflation, they are loth to push through painful budgetary reforms.
The political fallout from a break-up would be harder than the difficult politics needed to reach a deal to save the currency, he added.
The recent currency controls put in place by the government have made it harder for Argentines to procure American dollars to buy property, but foreign buyers should find no problems.
You have to run harder just to stay in the same place if your country's currency is weak and your wealth is tied up in land whose value is measured in dollars, as in this survey.
One problem with a single currency is that an external shock can hit some countries or regions harder than others.
And if the founder members of the single currency do push ahead towards harmonising tax, it will also become harder for Mr Blair to sell at home the idea of Britain joining the euro.
The single currency would change Europe's labour markets because it would make it harder for governments to adjust macroeconomic policies to suit circumstances in their own economies.
Whether all-out currency wars (in the form of trade protection) will emerge in 2011 is harder to tell.
Not only has the currency's strength helped to hold down American inflation, but a collapse would make it harder for the Fed to slash interest rates if the economy were to slow more sharply than expected.
However, profiting from the mispricing of risk in multiple-currency financial derivatives, or from the fact that a particular supermarket chains are undervalued, are harder for people outside the enclaves of Wall Street or the City of London to understand.
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