The low cost of adopting the euro

Forget about logging onto the Yahoo! instant currency converter - excellent facility though it is - when you want to find out how many Tonga pa'angas you can get for your Kazakhstan tenge (none, apparently).

The most impressively instant currency conversion trick is the one practised by US technology companies selling into the UK. Let's call it the 'dollar/sterling switchback'. Like all switchbacks, it takes you back to where you started from.

I'm sure you've noticed the phenomenon. It's where an invisible gobbet of code somewhere in the export department of United States Inc compares the US and UK markets, then does some swift calculations. A nanosecond later, presumably having analysed the latest conversion rates, prevailing winds, the price of pork bellies and the state of the special relationship, it replaces the dollar symbol with a pound sign, leaving the figures after it exactly the same.

Anyone who has ever walked down the aisle with the company's shopping trolley - to renew their vows at the finance director's door - knows this.

What's the UK price of a PC that sells for $1000 over the other side of the Atlantic? £1,000. Or of a $100 disk? Why, £100 of course.

This is perhaps the only conversion rate that has remained unchanged over the past decade, and perhaps explains what economists mean when they say sterling tracks the dollar. But it ignores, of course, the relative values of the two currencies.

Multiply this across all your IT purchases, and a more mischievous commentator might opine that you're overspending by the same amount that it would cost to convert your systems to the euro.

When I spoke to Siebel's Alex Ott ("That's O.T.T," he explained) at the CRM giant's user conference last year, the European vice president expounded on his belief that the UK joining the eurozone would be a boon to his company's strategy for three-figure growth. Pick any US software or hardware vendor and they'll tell you the same thing.

Now, this could be an argument for doing the opposite; after all, why take the word of sales-led and acquisitive US software vendors? But Ott's reasoning was simple: it would allow US companies to address Europe - perhaps ironically, given the high number of Siebel's purchases over the last 12 months - as one fully-integrated entity, and price accordingly.

Whenever people talk about the euro ceding our economic independence and/or culture to some multi-headed superstate, I am reminded of the broker who cornered me at the London Stock Exchange last year. "We've just saved the exchange from the filthy hands of the Germans!" he belched, listing slightly towards his glass of port.

For euro opponents such as this, that cultural identity and independence is almost always an English one, not one that includes the union of devolved nations. It reflects, in their view, a cultural life so strong that it would crumble at the loss of the pound. This aspect of our cultural identities I, for one, would like to abandon, along with warm beer and the murmur of accountants among the dreaming spires.

For all the bluster about independence from continental Europe, it cannot benefit us in a global economy. Sooner or later, we will catch the US cold, while our competitors there, in Europe and in the Far East will continue to hike up the price of high-tech goods to the UK market, while basing unsustainable, commodity jobs here to the long-term detriment of the economy.