Recently released documents confirm that when the Eurozone was founded, there was widespread awareness, particularly in Germany that Southern European countries were not even close to the fiscal conditions that would have reduced the risk of monetary integration. Yet then chancellor Helmut Kohl and other European leaders decided that the benefits of European unity were worth the gamble that cohesion could be maintained until there was sufficient Europe-wide support for tighter fiscal unity. When the financial crisis of 2007-08 exposed the fatal flaw, the global credit markets essentially called Europe's bet.