“On its first day of official business, the euro proved so popular on the streets that banks in some countries were overwhelmed,” according to a story in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“Germans defied predictions of a grudging transition in Europe’s largest economy by lining up to ditch their marks in such numbers that two branches of HVB Group had to temporarily close. In the Netherlands, there were postholiday bottlenecks at automated-teller machines that had customers fuming in bitterly cold weather. And every one of the 2,600 outdoor ATMs in Austria were thrown out of commission for an hour Wednesday afternoon, although the company that services the machines said the culprit was a computer glitch, not demand for euros.”

“The European Central Bank had predicted that most people in the 12 euro-zone countries would swap their national currencies for euros within the first two weeks of the Jan. 1 introduction of notes and coins. It might happen even sooner: In Belgium, for example, 30% of Belgian francs in circulation had been traded for euros even before banks closed on the euro’s second day as a bona fide common currency.”

” ‘The euro cash changeover is going smoothly, even better than we had expected,’ said Eugenio Domingo Solans, executive board member of the ECB.”

“Germans’ apparent enthusiasm for the euro was probably the most surprising. Opinion polls in the past year had consistently indicated a majority would rather keep the cherished mark, the symbol of Germany’s postwar success. But on Wednesday, from Bavaria to Berlin, Germans waited in long lines for harried tellers to make exchanges.”

” ‘The clients seem to want to get rid of their marks,’ said Wolfgang Ziegler, head manager for the euro changeover at HVB Group, Germany’s second-largest bank. ‘We were prepared for it, but not on this scale.’ This article was prepared by G. Thomas Sims, Christopher Rhoads, Neal Boudette, Marcus Walker, David Woodruff, Carlta Vitzthum, Yaroslav Trofimov, Deborah Ball and Bandon Mitchener.”

“In Munich, two HVB branches even had to close their counters for about 10 minutes until enough people gave up and went away for business to resume. At Frankfurt’s savings bank, the Frankfurter Sparkasse, 400 employees from the head office were pulled in to help work the counters. At a branch across from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the line stretched through the lobby and out into a pedestrian zone. The scene was much the same at a Deutsche Bank branch in Frankfurt, where 73-year-old Gerda Beisinger was determined to surrender her last marks on only the second day of the euro.”