I'm no expert here, but was interested in why EUR has always been somewhat close in value to USD instead of being worth a lot more or a lot less, so I tried to look it up. EUR was set 1:1 to a previous unit of account (not a circulating currency) called the European Currency Unit (ECU), which was set 1:1 to an even earlier iteration, the European Unit of Account (EUA). According to Wikipedia, EUA "was defined as 0.888671 grams of gold, or one US dollar."[1] This was in 1962 when the US was on the gold standard. USD and ECU/EUA began drifting apart starting in 1971 when we abandoned the gold standard. So I guess you could say that the original intent was for dollar parity, but that decision was pretty far removed from the creation of the euro over 30 years later.