The euro, the successor to the Exchange Rate Mechanism, would become a one-time internal fix of all the different European currencies in exchange for a single external floating currency, with one important difference. Rather than pegging and retaining national currencies and printing presses, after the fix the national currencies would be abolished and the printing presses would be handed over to the Germans to make sure that neither inflation nor devaluation of the currency would ever again be options. Instead, armed with a new independent central bank that had only one goal, to keep inflation around 2 percent, regardless of the output and employment costs, via control of interest rates, prices and wages would automatically adjust to the external balance. In other words, they built a gold standard in a democracy, again.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 216