More nations want the euro as their currency

LONDON -- The euro is the Miss Congeniality of world currencies right now.

Icelanders are clamoring to adopt it. Danes and Swedes are having second thoughts about snubbing it in the past. The Poles and Hungarians are accelerating plans to make the euro their money.

Even in Britain, which has held to the pound with bulldog-like ferocity, there's talk of possibly joining the euro.

These countries' stand-alone currencies have been so buffeted by a global financial meltdown and recession in recent weeks that long-standing opposition to joining with the 15 other European countries that use the euro is dissipating.

"People in these countries have less confidence in their currencies than they do in the euro or the dollar now," says Ralf Wiegert, senior economist at economic analysis firm IHS Global Insight in Frankfurt, Germany.

The U.S. dollar is an unlikely substitute for their own money, Wiegert says, so they're looking for the next most stable and adoptable currency that investors won't run from or currency speculators won't attack. That's the euro. Many of these countries had been doing just fine economically without the euro and have rejected joining the "eurozone" bloc of countries that use it.

The financial crisis of recent weeks has changed that — perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in Iceland.

The tiny country isn't a member of the European Union, a prerequisite for joining the eurozone. Joining the EU would have meant turning control of what Iceland considers its fishing rights over to the 27-member political bloc. Joining the eurozone would have meant Iceland's central bank turning control of interest rates over to the European Central Bank.

Iceland's stock market boomed in the 1990s. Its deregulated banks grew to have assets nine times the country's economic output.

But by September, Iceland was on the edge of collapse. The global liquidity crisis drained its banks. The krona fell 40%. Neither the central bank nor the government had the money to stabilize the krona, bail out the banks and avoid national bankruptcy. Iceland had to go to friends in Europe for cash.