We told you, that is, that the world needed a second continental zone of monetary and financial stability to balance and restrain the American dollar. The euro will happen, and its creation will have more impact on the dollar and the global economy than had previously been expected. The prospect that Frenchmen would peacefully abandon the franc, Germans would say auf wiedersehen to the mark and Belgians, Spaniards and others would follow suit has been impossible for many Americans and Asians to grasp. After all, we wouldn't do that.
Money is identity for nations.
It is history and power as well as a means of exchanging value. An attempt to abandon the dollar for a new currency would be labeled revolutionary, suicidal or worse in the United States, which has the most to gain by defending the global status quo economically and politically. But Europe, mired in suffocating unemployment and feeble growth, is desperate enough to risk change. The battering that Asian currencies, including the Japanese yen, have taken in recent months has reinforced a commitment to change and opened new opportunity for a rival to the dollar. In the previous four decades, Europe was the zone of the world's most important and destabilizing currency turmoil.