Marcel Proust wrote that in the Bourse an ill emperor is already dead while a besieged city is already fallen. Well, there is little doubt about the ailing condition of Economic and Monetary Union (Emu). It has proved to be a creature that the great monetary thinkers of the past, such as JS Mill, Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman, would have abhorred. The monster could indeed meet a fatal end – most plausibly via the forces of European monetary disintegration. It is possible, though