How did they get it so wrong? Greece’s economy is so bad that Greek President Carolos Papoulias said his country has “reached the edge of the abyss.” The Greek mess threatens the safety and stability of the entire eurozone. The common currency could be destroyed.

Many commentators—especially the Euroskeptic ones—point out that the project seemed bound to fail from the start. What they miss is that this is literally true. The euro project really was bound to fail—or at least to come close to doing so. It was designed to do so. This may be a crisis, but it is a carefully planned one.

“Berlin has been planning for this crisis before it even adopted the euro. European elites knew it would eventually come. And they will soon present a solution,” wrote the Trumpet’s editor in chief Gerald Flurry last year.

Like a master criminal, the Euro-federalists behind the crisis have made Greece’s financial demise seem like suicide, or accidental death. But really, the detectives in the media are looking at it the wrong way. This is more than a case of reckless spending. It’s a whodunit.

The Plot

Greece has been caught in a two-stage trap. First, by joining the euro, it was plunged into the world of low interest rates.

The interest rate is a tool governments use to manipulate the economy. Different interest rates are needed for different countries in different situations. In a way, it can be like alcohol. A burly bodybuilder could knock back several pints of lager without it having any noticeable affect. But the same quantity could floor a petite ballerina.

Greece, along with a few other countries, just couldn’t handle the cheap credit. It was the ballerina. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that: Greece was an alcoholic ballerina—already heavily addicted to credit. Having lied about the amount of its government debt in order to get into the euro club, it was already headed for disaster. The euro just made the alcohol cheaper.

Usually, lenders would be cautious about lending to a country that seems dangerously drunk on debt already. But they kept on giving cheap credit to Greece. They assumed that if anything went wrong, because Greece was in the euro, Germany would pick up the tab. Rather than having to pay more and more interest, as its position got worse, Greece was given cheap credit until lenders suddenly realized that Germany might not pay after all, and hiked up their rates.

Greece is no innocent bystander in this debacle. But neither are the European central bankers. They knew that given access to cheap credit, Greece and other similar nations would soon get inebriated. But perhaps even they were surprised by how quickly it happened.

This is when the second stage of the plot kicks in. Usually a nation with Greece’s problems would devalue its currency by printing more money. With more money in circulation, the debts become easier to pay. This is a painful process—and the creditors get cheated—but usually it’s the least painful option available.

But because it is in the euro, Greece cannot print more money: Its currency is controlled by the European Central Bank (ecb), which is controlled by Germany. By staying in the euro, Greece is denied the tools it needs to fix its problems, which has led to its current position, where it needs European help. And it may have to give up a lot to get it.

The Spirit of Charlemagne

Europe’s monetary endeavors have always been part of a plan to gain more political control. They have never existed solely to aid the economy.

The legacy of Charlemagne appears continually in the discussions of Europe. It is one of the clearest hints of the true goal of Europe. Charlemagne forged Western Europe into a single, Catholic, military empire. He was also famous for his common currency, minting standardized silver coins all over his empire. His coins helped spur trade, but most importantly, they gave Europe a sense of unity.

“[H]is portrait coinage,” writes one historian, “sent an impressive and influential message of imperial status and power throughout the Frankish world—and beyond” (Joanna Story, Charlemagne: Empire and Society). Indeed it did: Charlemagne’s coins were deliberately modeled after Roman coinage, bearing a portrait of the emperor for the first time since the fall of Rome. They replaced more crudely made local coins, bearing the name of a local ruler.

When hashing out the details of the European Monetary System (a precursor to the euro), then French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt held a summit in Aachen—the main seat of Charlemagne’s authority. Bernard Connolly writes in his book The Rotten Heart of Europe, “The symbolism was heavily underlined in both France and Germany; the two leaders paid a special visit to the throne of Charlemagne and a special service was held in the cathedral; at the end of the summit, Giscard remarked that: ‘Perhaps when we discussed monetary problems, the spirit of Charlemagne brooded over us.’”

This is the spirit European leaders wish to revert to: one that used currency to unify and control a squabbling bunch of nations, while it tried to increase its power abroad by forcibly converting others to Catholicism. Charlemagne spent decades murdering Saxons in order to try and force them to unify and accept Catholicism. This is the spirit of Charlemagne—a spirit that wants to resurrect the Roman Empire across Europe and will let nothing stand in its way. It is a spirit that thinks nothing of deliberately plunging a nation into economic catastrophe if it is for the greater good of European unity.

The New Roman Empire

Charlemagne saw himself not as founding a new empire, but simply reviving the much older Roman Empire. “After the Empress Irene had her son Constantine vi blinded in 797, both easterners and westerners regarded the imperial throne as vacant,” writes Stanley Chodorow in The Mainstream of Civilization. “Why not, they asked, resurrect the Roman Empire with Charles [Charlemagne] as emperor?” (emphasis mine throughout). Charlemagne’s empire was nothing new—it was a resurrection of what had gone before.

The movers and shakers behind modern Europe don’t see themselves as doing anything different. They, like Hitler and Napoleon before them, hark back to Charlemagne, who merely saw himself as reviving the Roman Empire. This succession of empires, all claiming the mantle of the Roman Empire, was precisely foretold in your Bible. Scripture forecasts a major empire that will appear to be dead, but will be resurrected again some time later. For more information on this, see the third chapter of our booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.

It is because of this understanding that the Trumpet has known from the start where the euro was leading. “Monetary union is but a means to an end—the fiscal means to achieving the goal of political union—a federation of European nation-states—in fact, a European empire,” we wrote in 1998—before euro nations began converting to the new currency.

Nine years later, it became clearer exactly how this could happen. In the summer of 2007, in the midst of America’s financial collapse, Bernard Connolly wrote, “[W]hatever mistakes Greenspan may have made, he just got it wrong: he didn’t deliberately set up this Greek tragedy.

“In contrast, the EU quite deliberately created the most dangerous credit bubble of all: emu [Economic Monetary Union],” he continued. “And, whereas the mission of the Fed is to avoid a financial crisis, the mission of the ecb is to provoke one. The purpose of the crisis will be, as [Romano] Prodi, then Commission president, said in 2002, to allow the EU to take more power for itself. The sacrificial victims will be, in the first instance, families and firms (and banks and investors) in countries such as Ireland and Club Med. Subsequently, German savers (or British taxpayers) will bear the burden of bailouts that a newly empowered ‘EU economic government’ will ordain. …

“The resulting carnage in the financial system of the whole euro area will make the present global financial crisis, serious though it is, seem almost insignificant.”

“Watch Germany,” wrote Mr. Flurry as the Greek crisis began to unfold in late 2008. “Watch for Germany to be at the helm in a restructuring not only of EU member nations’ economies, but of the entire European Union itself! That union will be united and then guided by the Vatican.”

And now what do we see? The entire Continent is looking to Germany to decide the future of Greece and the euro. German Chancellor Angela Merkel sits as Caesar, with the fallen gladiator before her. Thumbs up, and Greece is spared, thumbs down, and its economy is destroyed. Soon, it could be the euro itself squirming as it awaits Germany’s verdict.

The Future

Will the euro be sacrificed, or spared? We don’t know. Already some are calling for the more stable economies to join a new currency—the euromark. Germany may allow the euro to fail completely and rebuild a new currency. Or it may use the crisis to entrench its control over the currency and the nations that use it. But Germany holds all of the cards—or rather, all the gold.

As we wrote back in 2008, “[I]t is noteworthy that the German central bank holds the second-largest reserves of gold in the world. During the first quarter of 1999, at the same time the euro was launched, Germany bought up huge reserves of gold. Enough, according to the Economic Intelligence Review, to back an entire currency (March 2000). In addition, when the 11 nations joined the euro, they signed over their gold reserves to the European Central Bank, in Frankfurt, Germany.”

Already, European states looks to Germany as the leader of Europe by virtue of its large economy alone. No one is paying much attention to gold reserves right now. But when the chips really are down and entire currencies start collapsing, gold will become important once again.

Ultimately, this Greek debacle will be used by the Euro-federalists to further unite Europe. The founder of the Trumpet’s predecessor, the Plain Truth, forecast this for years. “I believe that some event is going to happen suddenly, just like out of a blue sky, that is going to shock the whole world, and is going to cause the nations in Europe to realize they must unite!” Herbert W. Armstrong said in July 1984.

“Now I think I can see what may be the very event that is going to trigger it, and that is the economic situation in the world,” he said.

We don’t have to know the ins and outs of exactly what will happen to the euro to know the long-term outcome. Bible prophecy tells us. Out of this financial crisis, a united European Empire will emerge.