What Future for the International Monetary System?

The time has come to begin contemplating a common currency for the industrialized democracies. This idea is much too radical to garner much political support in the near future, but it does offer a way to overcome a number of difficulties that these economies now face, and that are likely to become more, not less, serious in the coming years. So despite the novelty of the proposal, a common currency provides a focal point for analysis, one that may in turn suggest intermediate steps to accomplish some of the same results with less political commitment.