July 22, 2011
At the beginning of the euro's descent into the disaster zone, in March last year, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, came up with a proposal that shocked his bosses in Berlin and beyond. What the eurozone needed, in the absence of a fiscal union to underpin the monetary union, was a European version of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
A lifelong champion of European union, sitting in a cabinet dominated by a younger generation of politicians inclined to put Germany first in a more assertive way, Schäuble was ignored. His proposals were binned.
He may now be having the last laugh. The most striking departure outlined on Thursday at the eurozone's "moment of truth" summit in Brussels was a raft of measures that, if agreed and implemented, would turn the single currency's bailout fund into a baby EMF, replicating the kind of remit across the eurozone that the IMF operates globally.
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