The onslaught of the mighty euro

Currency unions have come and gone but this is by far the biggest and boldest experiment of them all. The euro will wrench market share from the dollar as an international and reserve currency. It will trigger a gigantic rebalancing of investmetn portfolios. It will stimulate growth in equity markets and labour mobility. Yet it also threatens to tyrannize the economic management of individual states and pitch Europe towards the imperative of a single economic policy. In the following series of articles, writers and economists describe euroland, what forces will drive it, and what impact it will have on banking, finance and international markets.