Pierre Werner
Pierre Werner was prime minister of Luxembourg from 1959 to 1974 and from 1979 to 1984, twenty years, the Christian Social banker and finance minister who made the Grand Duchy the financial centre it became. There was the holding-company law, the Eurobond market that Luxembourg's stock exchange listed from 1963 when London and New York would not. There were the banks that came from Germany to escape the Bundesbank's reserve requirements and from everywhere to escape the withholding tax, and the RTL broadcasting empire, so that a country whose economy had been steel and the Arbed mills was, by the steel crisis of 1975, already something else. He was the author of the Werner Report of October 1970, commissioned by the Hague summit, that proposed economic and monetary union for the European Community in three stages by 1980, with a single currency, a central bank and a common budget policy, which the collapse of Bretton Woods and the oil crisis killed, and which Delors's committee of 1989 took out of the drawer. The euro is his in the way that the Community is Monnet's. He was born in Saint-André near Lille in 1913 to Luxembourg parents, studied law in Luxembourg and Paris and finance at the Paris school of political science, worked at the Banque Générale, was the government's commissioner for banking after the war. He was finance minister from 1953 under Bech and Frieden before taking the government in 1959. The first period was the Benelux economic union of 1958, the Luxembourg compromise of January 1966 that ended de Gaulle's empty chair crisis. It was negotiated in the city and named for it. There were the European institutions kept in Luxembourg by the compromise of 1965 when the Commission went to Brussels, the satellite company SES was founded, and the Court and the Investment Bank settled on the Kirchberg. The second was the steel crisis managed by the tripartite model of government, employers and unions that the country still uses, the state's taking a share in Arbed, and the handover to Santer in July 1984. He died in Luxembourg in June 2002, five months after the euro notes came out. The country's national library and the Commission's monetary prize carry his name.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 2002 CE
- Nationality: Luxembourgish
- Roles: prime minister, politician
