Architects of the euro reflect on its origins

13 June 2012 Last updated at 19:02 ET By James Melik Reporter, Business Daily, BBC World Service

Institutional figures across the eurozone have been scrambling to offer their latest solutions to the financial crisis.

It is a crisis which, in theory, should never have happened, say the figures who helped create it - if the stability and growth pact insisted upon by the then German finance minister, Theo Waigel, had been adhered to at the time of the creation of the euro in 1999.

Business Daily asked some of the architects of the single currency what went wrong, and whether the euro can survive.

Graham Bishop was a member of the European Commission's Maas Committee - preparing the changeover to the single currency - and then the Financial Services Strategy Group.

He insists that had the requirements for sound public finances, embodied in the Maastricht Treaty, been met and fulfilled, the current crisis would not have happened.

"If countries with budget deficits had kept them low, there would not have been a need for the sort of measures we see now," he says.

"But the other problem that we didn't foresee, was that the US would export its subprime mortgages on such a scale and that the government would need to step in."

He says that it is easy to explain monetary union, but that political union is a very different matter.

"There is already a lot of political union through the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament," he notes.

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Architects of the euro reflect on its origins