It was mainly on account of technical reasons that the euro banknotes and coins could not be introduced simultaneously at the start of Stage Three of EMU at the beginning of 1999. Despite this, the national currencies of the Member States of EMU have only been representing denominations of euro since then. The euro is therefore already "OUR money".
I should like to refer briefly to the period before the introduction of the single currency at the beginning of 1999. Of course, we should not talk only of the past. The monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) is after all forward-looking and thus I shall take a forward-looking stance myself.