It is disconcerting to see an honest man turn bad. For years Theo Waigel, Germany's finance minister, has insisted that the criteria for assessing countries' fitness for Europe's planned single currency, the euro, must be interpreted strictly. He has railed against accounting fiddles to squeeze countries' public debts and budget deficits below the Maastricht ceilings of 60% and 3% of GDP respectively. But no sooner did new tax and spending projections confirm that Germany was itself likely to miss the targets for 1997 (the benchmark year), than he began fudging with the best of them.
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