The heir apparent to the ECB's top job - Bank of France governor Mr Jean Claude Trichet - stands trial today, casting doubt over whether he can lead the central bank into its fifth year.
Yet European policymakers and markets are remarkably sanguine, reflecting their confidence Mr Trichet will be acquitted of any wrong doing in the near-collapse of Crédit Lyonnais in time to succeed ECB president Mr Wim Duisenberg in July.
Mr Trichet is accused of having overlooked misleading accounting reports concerning the formerly state-owned Crédit Lyonnais in the early 1990s as it plunged towards near-bankruptcy.
He will go on trial with eight others, including former Bank of France governor Mr Jacques de Larosiere, who served as managing director of the International Monetary Fund and president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
There are worries over who will take over the ECB presidency, not least because Germany - the world's second largest economy - is in a slump that has no quick end in sight.
In the United States, markets are already anxious that Federal Reserve chairman Mr Alan Greenspan, the Fed's clear intellectual leader and shaper of its interest-rate policy, may step down in the next year or two.