Thus, shared sovereignty, aggravated by different preferences and different institutional frameworks and cultures, has imposed the need to identify the required minimum conditions for the functioning of the Monetary Union. This means that the group had to adopt rules not deriving from market sustainability principles, but rather from the need to install and operate self-imposed mutual-trust mechanisms.
The main reason for running through this material has been to make the point that the environment for monetary policy over the past year has been challenging.