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[...] France's treasury director at the time, a certain Jean-Claude Trichet, expressed the French authorities' hubris admirably. In a bid to refute the plain truth that the Deutsche Mark was the anchor keeping the EMS-ERM system grounded, he denied the dominance of the German currency with the extr…

By 1987 the dollar had devalued to levels that were jeopardizing Wall Street . in the same year a G7 meeting was held in Paris at which American officials pushed the opposite way, towards a strengthening of the dollar. At that meeting, which is now known as the Louvre Accord, Washington bullied the Europeans into accepting coordinated efforts to strengthen the dollar.

By the Plaza Accord, struck in 1985, Tokyo was forced to appreciate the yen substantially in relation to the dollar, with the Deutsche Mark compelled to follow suit.

convince German voters that monetary union was Germanizing France and exporting Teutonic discipline to Latin Europe, turning grasshoppers into ants rather than importing French sloth into Germany

the libretto of France's defeat had been written back in 1983