June 1, 1998

European Central Bank

European Central Bank and European System of Central Banks are established

Six appointments taking effect created two institutions at once — and put the body they replaced into liquidation the same day.

An institution born from a personnel decision

On 1 June 1998 the appointments of the ECB's president, vice-president and four other Executive Board members took effect, and with them both the European Central Bank and the European System of Central Banks were established.

The Treaty provided that the two would come into being as soon as the Executive Board was appointed by common accord of the participating governments.

Willem Frederik “Wim” Duisenberg took office as the ECB's first president on a formal eight-year appointment, with Christian Noyer as vice-president; Duisenberg publicly maintained that any early retirement would be his own decision.

The predecessor went into liquidation

The ECB replaced the European Monetary Institute, which Duisenberg had headed, and inherited its preparatory work, infrastructure and staff. The EMI did not simply change its name: it went into liquidation, and its assets and liabilities passed automatically to the ECB.

The Executive Board began allocating responsibilities on 2 June and prepared the first Governing Council and General Council meetings, held on 9 June.

Eleven member states were by then preparing to adopt the euro.

What 1 June 1998 was not

Establishing the bank was not introducing the euro or starting the single monetary policy; both came on 1 January 1999. The new institution had about seven months to test systems and settle the rules a multinational monetary policy would run on.

The system created that day is also not the Eurosystem. The ESCB comprises the ECB and the national central banks of all then-EU member states, while the Eurosystem is the ECB plus the central banks of euro-area members.

Nor was the ECB an EU institution in the formal sense in 1998; it received that status only under the Lisbon Treaty.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →