Please explain the following quotes in six to seven sentences from "Cross of Euros" by Kevin H. O'Rourke and Alan M. Taylor. Please also give any contemporary relevance of the quote. Do not just state what the quote is explicitly saying.

Quote 1

"A number of countries across Europe may eventually ask themselves if number of countries across Europe may eventually ask themselves if fundamental circumstances have changed in a way that renders their previous commitment to the eurozone inapplicable. A eurozone break-up would involve the redenomination of assets and liabilities, and in all likelihood sovereign defaults in some cases as well. This would imply large cross-border redistributive effects with substantial official-sector claims in dispute. An even larger plethora of private contracts would be affected, involving not only eurozone banks and firms; the scope for legal chaos seems clear. If the eurozone is destined to break up, then speed and cooperation are essential if both destabilizing capital flow cooperation are essential if both destabilizing capital flows and years of costly litigation and uncertainty are to be avoided. Such a benign scenario may seem fanciful in the extreme, but if eurozone policymakers do not rapidly move towards a different macroeconomic policy mix, and at the very least a meaningful banking union, then Europe may ultimately find itself clutching at such straws." (188)

Quote 2

"The difficulty of developing eurozone-wide automatic stabilizers should focus attention on the design and policies of the European Central Bank. Since asymmetric adjustment based on internal devaluation is so costly and ineffective, the European Central Bank should allow a higher rate of inflation for the eurozone as a whole at times of economic and financial stress to facilitate relative price adjustment. This could be embedded in various policy regimes, like the much-debated nominal GDP target or the "Evans rule" of the US Federal Reserve, which promises to keep interest rates low until certain unemployment targets are reached. A shift to such a regime need not be viewed as incompatible with the price stability mandate of the European Central Bank. If these kinds of changes are politically impossible, pessimism about the euro's survival becomes more justifiable." (187)

Quote 3

"Recent developments in Europe, such as the 2012 decision in principle to move towards a banking union, offer some hope of eventual institutional reform. Unfortunately, more rapid change may be required today in the eurozone than was the case in nineteenth-century America. The nature of modern economies, and of politics in the independent democracies that comprise the eurozone, is such that Europe may not have the luxury of experimenting for 140 years before finding workable arrangements. Popular calls for public goods, social insurance, countercyclical macroeconomic policy, and financial stability cannot be brushed aside so easily as in the less-democratic era of the nineteenth-century classical gold standard" (184)

Quote 4

"Just as banking union progressed gradually in the United States, so too did fiscal union. Initially the central government left states to themselves under a "no bailout" constitutional settlement brokered by Alexander Hamilton: the US central government enacted a once-and-for-all debt mutualization, assuming all state-level Revolutionary War debts, but then expected each of the states to stand on its own fiscally, observe near-budget balance, and if need be, default. These rules survive to the present, and many states have been through fiscal distress and even default. The ability to default provided a dimension of flexibility at times of crisis, while protecting federal taxpayers from moral hazard risk and bailout burdens entailing higher taxes and/or inflation on the collective. State-level debts are typically modest in size, and, as noted, that paper is largely kept off US banks' balance sheets. But such arrangements also implied a potential bias toward pro-cyclical fiscal policies at the state-and-local level, a destabilizing feature witnessed again in today's Great Recession" (183).

Quote 5

"The gold standard operate as a straitjacket on macroeconomic policy, according to the macroeconomic policy trilemma which says that a country cannot simultaneously choose three policies: 1) a fixed exchange rate, 2) open capital markets, and 3) monetary policy autonomy. It must pick two. If a country chooses open capital markets, "uncovered interest parity" must hold; that is, since arbitrage equalizes expected returns at home and abroad, the domestic interest rate must equal the foreign interest rate plus the expected appreciation of the foreign currency. If a country chooses open capital markets and fixed exchange rates, domestic interest rates at levels suitable to domestic conditions, then exchange rates can no longer be fixed. However, a country can choose an autonomous monetary policy and a fixed exchange rate if it imposes capital controls. While the trilemma is a simplification, ample historical evidence supports its key predictions. It provides a useful organizing framework for international macroeconomic history as the essential historical plot lines revolve around which leg of the trilemma countries have chosen to sacrifice" (171).

Quote 6 "The United States has a true monetary union, not simply a more or less hard exchange rate peg between state currencies. As we will see, it gradually developed a common central bank, a banking union, and a fiscal union. The obvious difference between the United States and the eurozone is that in the American case political union preceded monetary union, while the European gamble has been to try to develop monetary union in the absence of political (and fiscal and banking) union. Finally, the gold standard was not even formally speaking an exchange rate agreement. Rather, it was a series of country-by-country monetary regimes linking the value of currencies to the price of gold, obliging central banks or their equivalents to hold sufficient reserves to be able to make this commitment credible. It only became a quasi-fixed exchange rate regime as a by-product of free trade in gold, which led to gold prices being almost (not entirely as arbitrage was costly) equalized in different countries. Countries retained their own currencies, central banks, and political and financial sovereignty and could sever the link between their currencies and gold whenever they wished" (170).

Quote 7

"European monetary union has eliminated exchange rate variability among eurozone members by replacing national currencies with a single currency, the euro. The euro is managed by a common European Central Bank whose primary objective is price stability, defined in practice as involving inflation less than 2 percent. If this goal is satisfied, the central bank is also supposed to support "general economic policies in the Union" with a view to achieving objectives such as full employment. The eurozone members are all members of the European Union, but remain independent states. Under the original architecture, national authorities handle banking supervision, resolution, and deposit insurance; there is no banking union" (168).

Quote 8

"Eventually the United States experienced a sequence of crises sufficiently intense to spur change. The first shock came at the time of the US Civil War. The need for union war finance spurred the National Banking Acts, creating a new standardized national currency, with these uniform notes backed by banks' holding US Treasury debt. The Acts also set up a Comptroller to regulate the new form of nationally chartered banks. The new structure placed a large quantity of US Treasury debt on bank balance sheets and not just as a wartime expedient; it remains there to this day as the US banking system's reference safe and liquid asset. Yet no central bank or lender of last resort appeared at this time, and pockets of "non-par" banking survived, especially in rural areas. Bank runs and crises remained, and recessions recurred frequently, but in a political-economic equilibrium where macroeconomic management was not expected to play a role" (181).