This raised a major intellectual and policy challenge for European countries trying to strengthen economic cooperation after the Second World War: it seemed simply inconceivable to jettison any of the three goals. Tommaso realised that financial repression would have provided only a temporary response to this question.
The accomplishment, in the early 1990s, of the central goal set down in the Treaty of Rome – a European common market, implying free trade and free capital movement – called for enhanced, and eventually fixed, exchange rate stability across member countries.