The governors of the central banks of these countries are now members of the ESCB’s General Council. In addition, the currencies of three of the ten countries have joined the exchange rate mechanism II (ERM II). Important challenges remain for these countries on the road to adopting the euro.
With my normal disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to turn to a brief review of the extraordinary performance of the US economy over the past five years. Since 1995, real gross domestic product has grown, on average, more than 4¼% per year.