Sir, Your editorial "Testing strength" (October 27), making the case that worries about the euro's rise are overdone, glosses over the basic fact that the eurozone countries constitute anything but a homogenous currency bloc.

In particular, it ignores the acute difficulties that a strong euro is now raising for countries like Spain, Ireland, Greece, Italy, and Portugal. The last thing that these countries need is a strong currency at a time when they are trying to redress their highly compromised public finances in the midst of severe economic recessions.

It is also far from clear why global rebalancing requires a strong euro, as your editorial asserts, as opposed to a major strengthening in the Asian currencies. According to the International Monetary Fund's latest World Economic Outlook estimates, the eurozone still has a small external current account deficit, while it is the Asian countries' large current account surpluses that are the main counterpart to the US current account deficit.

Desmond Lachman is a resident fellow at AEI.