This political cost is precisely the visible measure of collective commitment to the single currency project, which is necessary to ensure the economic and political resilience of EMU in the future. European political parties could be a catalyst for such a debate – by organising more discussions than they do now, not along national lines, but according to social preferences.
Thus, it will always be important for the Federal Reserve to maintain its integral role in the regulation of the financial system not only for the visibility this provides into the economy, but precisely in order to calibrate the sorts of relationships we have been talking about today.