That means that Draghi will be the man to guide the troubled euro through its next crisis. As we have seen as Greece, Italy and now Portugal spin into fiscal disaster and bailout, the plight of the euro is such that there is no shortage of likely candidates.

The most likely next crisis is the recognition of the obvious: that Greece needs a restructuring of its debt which means a lot of European banks taking a haircut. The most alarming would be the increasingly likely crisis in Spain, when the combination of a million unsold homes and unemployment now soaring to 23 percent forces the banks to recognize the inevitable and start swallowing bad property loans.

But even beyond the next inevitable crisis of the euro currency, Draghi will also be facing the double challenge of Europe's central banker. First, he has to craft an interest rate that works for all the euro members, booming Germany as well as stagnant France and Italy.

Secondly, he has to manage the rising threat of inflation, even though most European governments are discreetly hoping that some modest inflation will help make their massive debts more manageable. That is why Sarkozy may yet regret giving Draghi his public support in Rome last week.

Draghi, who was educated at Jesuit schools and went on to become the first Italian to win a doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a fairly orthodox economist. He was taught by Keynesians but learned about the importance of money supply at the Italian Treasury when he helped steer Italy through the economic crisis of the 1990s with devaluation and a massive privatization drive.

He is 63, and knows the United States well from his time in the 1980s as executive director of the World Bank and a stint at the Kennedy School at Harvard. He is also a trustee of the Brookings Institution in Washington and of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study. He knows the private sector, not just from Goldman but as a director of the Italian energy giant ENI.

Draghi's main problem was the Germans, who were long suspicious of an Italian at helm of the ECB. Earlier this year, the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung ran a now-famous attack headlined "Mamma Mia" that said "With Italians, inflation is a way of life, like tomato sauce with spaghetti."

But Bild changed its tune Friday, with an image of Draghi in a Prussian helmet and an editorial that claimed he was "the most German of the candidates" and deserved honorary citizenship. The newspaper may have had little choice. After the Bundesbank chief Axel Weber withdrew his candidacy, there were few other credible replacements for Jean-Claude Trichet, the current ECB chief who retires in October. And after Sarkozy gave his backing, the influential Luxembourg premier Jean-Claude Juncker also supported Draghi. As chairman of the euro group of finance ministers, Juncker carries a lot of weight.

Nonetheless, Draghi is going to have be like Caesar's wife, above suspicion when it comes to inflation, which rose yet again in April to 2.8 percent in the euro area, well above the 2 percent target. And the ECB has already started to raise interest rates.

If the Germans aren't to revolt against him, Draghi is going to have to prove himself to be an inflation hawk, which won't be easy when oil and food and commodity prices have all been trending upward. Draghi knows this, and has been making suitably hawkish speeches for some time.

"The appearance of inflationary tensions does require that we carefully assess the timing and methods for restoring normal monetary conditions and interest rates," he said in a carefully prepared speech in Verona in February. "Monetary policy must prevent a deterioration of expectations in order to keep the stimulus of international prices from passing through to domestic prices and wages in the longer term."

In that speech, Draghi signaled his own readiness for euro interest rates to start rising, which is exactly what the inflation-phobic Germans wanted to hear. The problem is that higher interest rates will make it even tougher for the eurozone's weaker members like Greece and Ireland. So like a clever politician, Draghi made an elegant of not wholly convincing argument that cutting inflation could help them, too.

"Real short-term interest rates that are markedly negative, as they have been over the past two years, have not improved the growth prospects of the less dynamic economies," he said. "In the weakest countries, in particular, the cost of borrowing could benefit from the narrowing of spreads on government securities following the adjustment of budget policies and from the containment of risk premiums as inflation expectations are kept under control."

Smart as he is, this new entrant to the top rank of central banking will be faced with challenges that have no precedent, starting with the extraordinary wave of liquidity that central banks have pumped into the global economy since the crisis began 30 months ago. And ahead lies the biggest challenge of all; the steady erosion of the dollar's primacy as the world's sole reserve currency.

The world should be heading for a tripartite currency system, based on the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Chinese yuan. But the crisis of the eurozone shows that the euro isn't yet fit for such a role and the Chinese don't allow their currency to be traded. So the global economy is resting on a three-legged stool with only one real leg and that one if wobbling.

How this ends, nobody knows but Draghi is going to have to be part of a solution.

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