The euro coins jingled merrily across the bar of the European Council's Justus Lipsius building in Brussels at this week's EU summit. The cash machine in the marble lobby delivered crisp new notes on demand. Three years after euro notes and coins first began to circulate in 12 EU countries, the euro is an unremarkable fact of everyday life. Yet for all that, it also remains an experiment. Indeed a deal arrived at by EU finance ministers over the weekend, and later endorsed by the summit, underlines just how experimental the single currency still is. The agreement was, in essence, to rip up the existing fiscal rules for euro members and start again. For eight years finance ministers have steadfastly insisted that the stability and growth pact is essential to the health of their single currency. The pact's demands for fines on countries that persistently run budget deficits bigger than 3% of GDP have been defended as an essential tool to stop improvident governments from undermining the euro. But now the rules have been so loosened that they have been rendered almost entirely meaningless.
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