George Soros has made a fortune by exploiting mistakes – even when they are his own. In four decades as a hedge fund manager he averaged a profit of nearly $1bn a year. His success, he said, was that he did not consider errors a source of shame but of pride. “Once we realise that imperfect understanding is the human condition,” he remarked, “there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” It is in that spirit that Mr Soros suggested to an audience in Paris that there was a way out of the current European crisis, but only if the European Union confronted its miscalculations and blunders. Advice from the uber-wealthy is a mixed blessing for the remain cause. To Mr Soros’s credit he left his business to back with cash the kind of “open societies” he favours, embodied by the EU’s voluntary association of equal states. It has been no quiet retirement: his foundation was chased out of Hungary pursued by antisemitic slurs accusing him of being a malevolent outside meddler.

However, the billionaire philanthropist’s analysis is both perspicacious and acute. Mr Soros argues that monetary union radically changed the dynamics of the EU, and the impact of the financial crash brought out into the open hitherto latent governance tensions. The solidarity of nations has been repeatedly tested, and often found wanting. He was right to add that the EU’s self-inflicted “addiction to austerity” has been exploited by populist politicians to build Eurosceptic support. They were also quick to exploit fears after the refugee crisis in 2015, when their warnings of terror threats and a breakdown in local public services seemed plausible to many. Migration also illustrates the absurdity of Britain’s Brexit obsession to Europeans: while the rest of the continent was fixated on mass migration of refugees from outside, Britain was gripped with the idea of controlling free movement within it by EU citizens.

The three most pressing problems facing the EU are the refugee crisis, a self-sabotaging austerity policy, and territorial disintegration. Mr Soros’s answers are simple – perhaps too simple, given the scale of the crisis. But they deserve a wide audience. On migration, Mr Soros sensibly suggests that the EU agrees a fair, unified migration policy and fosters democratic development in the poorer parts of the world to stem the flow of migrants. On Brexit, he advocates that Britain eventually rejoins a “multitrack Europe”: that is, nations travelling at different speeds to viable, different, permanent destinations within the EU.

These ideas ought to be taken seriously, although they are much easier said than done. Perhaps most important is what he recognises about the eurozone: that in its present form it is unstable. What has been exposed by the crisis in southern Europe – and is being highlighted today by Italy’s election – is a continuing failure to set up a proper fiscal policy for the entire eurozone alongside a common currency.

This is why France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, seeks a federal budget overseen by an EU finance minister. Much of his painful domestic programme is being carried out to demonstrate to Germany that France is committed to the sort of hard-money economics that Berlin likes. The eurozone currently entrenches a deflationary bias with no agreed framework for coordinated reflation. The European Central Bank has been buying up government bonds of countries that teeter on the brink of insolvency – but only if such nations submit to a self-defeating policy of tax hikes and spending cuts. This does not resolve the crisis, it just defers it. Like cheap wallpaper covering up cracks in the plaster, these hotchpotch measures conceal a precarious structure.

Almost half of unemployed persons of working age in the EU are at risk of poverty. Britain cannot duck this debate: London is the offshore financial centre of the eurozone, something that the Treasury and the Bank of England are wrestling with. Today, faced with the onset of a downturn, Europe’s policymakers can neither easily relax fiscal policy nor devalue their currencies to make their exports more competitive. Confronting and correcting this mistake should be a matter of the utmost urgency for the EU.