Demonstrably durable

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: now charging heavily to bear it, which will affect companies and governments inside the euro’s embrace as well as beyond it. As budgetary laxity and weak growth become costlier, reforms are more likely.

The crisis has another legacy: despite the weakness of the dollar in recent weeks, the euro may struggle to challenge the greenback as the world’s main reserve currency. Lately, it is true, the euro has gained in value against the dollar—partly because the ECB seems reluctant to follow the Federal Reserve’s path to zero interest rates. But the dollar held up better in the eye of the financial storms in October, when investors were most fearful. The American currency still has important advantages over the European newcomer.

Safety in numbers

The advantages of euro membership—and the perils to small European countries of being outside—were plain when the crisis was most severe. Last autumn capital drained from currencies that investors saw as risky. That included the paper of countries, such as Iceland, with bloated financial industries, as well as some eastern European states with current-account deficits, heavy public borrowing or (as in Hungary) a dangerous mix of both.

Euro-area countries with similar faults have been spared the currency crisis that plagued others. Eurocrats are quick to point out that Ireland’s guarantee of bank deposits and debt would seem threadbare if it still managed its own currency: investors might have taken fright at the scale of the banking sector compared with GDP. Being part of a big club has made a currency run far less likely (though Ireland’s membership of the euro is one reason it became a large financial centre in the first place). Belgium, with its big banks and huge public debt, has benefited from being an insider too. Spain would have struggled to fund its current-account deficit, the world’s second-largest, outside the euro.

At the worst point, investors ran from all but four big global currencies: the dollar, the euro, the yen and the yuan. Doubts were even raised (and remain) about the wisdom of holding the British pound and the Swiss franc, which each account for a small share of global foreign-exchange reserves. For some, Britain and Switzerland are Iceland or Ireland writ large, but without Ireland’s lifeboat—its membership of a large and liquid currency pool. Both countries have big banking industries with foreign-currency debts.