When the euro was born, it was born in the wrong economic circumstances.

You've had an extremely weak euro on the foreign exchange markets, you've had a very dubious policy being followed.

In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

If the ECB has to intervene regularly to support the euro, it is sending the wrong message to the public, who will be carrying euro notes and coins in 2002,

The euro will probably be the weakest among the three major currencies, given the economic fundamentals.

Were a lot of those guys ready? No. We had to force feed them due to circumstances with payroll, ... They went through growing pains, but a year or two later, things started to jell for them.