And let us not forget that the process leading to the introduction of the euro owes a great deal to the prescience of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who in the late 1970s conceived the European Monetary System and the precursor to the euro, the ECU.
A second lasting resource for Europe is a macroeconomic policy framework oriented towards the medium term. With hindsight observers now acknowledge that macroeconomic policies in some economies have in the past been insufficiently focused on medium-term stability and sustainability.