Angela Merkel: A Chancellorship Forged in Crisis

Chapter 12

Chronicles

Jean-Claude Trichet, who led the ECB during the crisis until Mario Draghi took over on November 1, 2011, recalls going to New York in early 1998 and telling Wall Street investors about the impending introduction of the euro on January 1 the following year. They told him he was talking nonsense. “Too bold, too strange, never done – absolutely impossible,” he said. “And I knew myself of course that it was totally prepared and it will be done. You had a strategic political commitment, not to speak of the technicalities of it, that was there. I told them that for the most important marketplace in the world it’s better to be in tune with reality.” He sees the crisis from the U.S. subprime calamity through to the sovereign debt ...