European Monetary Institute

This is not how Lamfalussy and his colleagues at the European Monetary Institute imagined the future two decades ago. 

Turning the road map into reality became his job when the European Monetary Institute was established in Frankfurt, home of the German Bundesbank, then Europe’s dominant interest-rate-setting institution.

After the European Monetary Institute’s first meeting, in January 1994, he told reporters: “I shall not accept a greater influence from the Bundesbank than if I had been sitting on the top of a mountain somewhere else.”

Dr. Lamfalussy was the first president of the European Monetary Institute, a short-lived institution created in 1994 with the sole purpose of setting up the European Central Bank and then willing itself out of existence.

Mr. Lamfalussy was the founding president of the European Monetary Institute, which later became the European Central Bank and which now oversees the eurozone monetary system.