On January 1st, 1999, we do sometimes forget this, the euro became our common currency. The franc, the deutschmark and the lira are no more than non-decimal expressions (in technocratic terms) of the euro. The euro is our common currency. Since January 1st, 1999, a central european bank conducts monetary policy.
It must be said that any observation made as early as 1999 is very different depending on whether one analyses the financial sector or some other business. It may be that a small deception was perceptible at first on that point, but it is wholly understandable: indeed, a 3-year transition period is a long time. The financial sector completely switched to the euro within the first week of January 1999, throughout the world; on exchange markets, on shares markets, on rates markets, on the public debt market mentioned recently, the euro established itself within one week as the common, exclusive currency for "euroland". On the other hand, it is a fact that euro use by the general public (yourselves and businesses) has remained extremely sketchy. We shall come back to that.
The second major date is yet to come: it is December 31st, 2001, which I shall differentiate from January 1st, 2002. It is not the same day. (...)
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