JIM O'NEILL: Former Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, United Kingdom, and former Chairman, Asset Management, Goldman Sachs International.

As the famous phrase goes, time will tell. And as another one goes, never let a crisis go to waste. What is certainly clearer five months into this pandemic is that Europe is responding to the challenge better than the United States. As the northern summer creeps on, this is something financial markets are taking note of, as the dollar loses some of its excessive strength, with the euro playing its own role along with other currencies.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, with the absence of a shared fiscal debt instrument, the weakness of the euro project has been only too stark. In the earliest days of this crisis, with Italy at its epicenter, it was quite clear that unless euro policymakers acted in a different way, we could be headed for a new version of the recent Greek crisis, but on a much grander scale. In this regard, I have often believed that there would come a point where core European policymakers, especially in Germany, would be forced to declare a stronger hand on whether they want to commit to support to Italy or not. I suspect this point has now come.

As a founding member of the European Union, Italy has always been at the center of contradictions about the EU project, and when it became a founding joiner of the euro, these contradictions become more stark. Many have often found it difficult to understand why Italy was in the euro.

Due to my own earliest experiences of understanding the broader nature of the euro project, however, especially its historical context and its geographic and social nature, it was clear to me that Italy was highly likely to join the euro, and would become a source of frequent turbulence.

One of my more fun memories of my most active days in financial markets was at the top-floor restaurant in a beautiful hotel in Rome where we hosted around twenty top U.S. fund managers in early 1998. They had all just arrived from Frankfurt on day four of a European tour to consider the prospect of the euro coming into existence at the start of 1999. A mere two of them thought, after arriving from...