As much as I admire Germany and its impressive manufacturing industry, the almost total reliance on exports as a way to achieve growth means that Germany cannot be the engine of growth that the Eurozone needs it to be.  The economic policies of China and Germany were just as much responsible for the financial crash as those of the debtor nations who have to exist for the policies of those two countries to work. German and Chinese surpluses were never returned and spent in their domestic markets but were recycled in the debtor states so that they could continue to buy German and Chinese goods to support the export growth that these two countries are so reliant on, of course this Ponzi scheme could not continue indefinitely hence the crash. Much of Europe is still in denial about some of the causes of the financial crash so it is hardly surprising that they cannot find a cure if they misdiagnose the illness. Anglo-saxon style casino banking was a convenient scapegoat which allowed others just as culpable to get away scot free. It explains the constant attacks on the city of London while ignoring their own zombie banks which are loaded up with sovereign debt which may turn out to be worthless. How many stress tests have they conducted on banks which have turned out to be nothing but meaningless shams that convinced no one.

It is worth remembering that at the introduction of the Euro the most vocal critics were British and what they predicted then subsequently happened. There is a lot to admire about Germany but do not have all the answers...

Germany's de facto leadership of the EU has been terrible. Most especially on the economic front. Certainly Germany itself benefitted from the hard currency policy it imposed on the other eurozone countries, as the industries of those countries folded one by one and their markets were taken over by German ones. But it was a disaster for the rest of us, and ultimately even Germany will be hurt as we become more and more unable to buy its goods. The only way soft-currency countries could have continued to compete with hard-currency ones like Germany was if the latter had allowed some domestic wage inflation. But they didn't, instead asking troubled countries to impose wage deflation - which they well knew was impossible, because wages are determined by contract and cannot be lowered easily any more than pensions.

For soft-currency countries, and even medium-hard currency ones like France, the euro has been a trap. You can't leave it without creating devaluation fears which will drive interest rates into the stratosphere, and if you stay in it your industry erodes year by year until you become a third-world vassal of Germany. The teutonic refusal to restore the competitivity of its southern neighbors by increasing its own wages has been selfish and destructive.

The new German assertiveness in foreign policy matters hasn't been much better. Merkel's dominant and belligerent stance during the Crimea crisis did more harm than good and is one reason why Russia and the EU are hardly talking any more, let alone working together to defuse the Ukrainian crisis. In any case if Germany wants to continue to call the foreign policy shots for all of Europe, it might start by doing its share of defense spending instead of relying on the French/British security umbrella.

Power comes with responsibility and Germany under Merkel hasn't shown much of it.

Merkel has resisted Stiglitz's calls for a Keynesian spur to recovery, including pooling debts in commonly-issued "Eurobonds" to allow members of the currency to borrow money at lower interest rates. Stiglitz should stick to his side of the pond. I'm sure that's Merkel's opinion of him, for it was the ability to borrow at low rates that was one cause of the euro crisis in the first place. Nations like Italy, France and (famously) Greece just went on a binge with all that cheap money they raised. Merkel hardly wants to give them a chance to do it all over again.

Having recently returned from Italy I can confirm Merkel's view of the Italians - they are living as if there was no recession. While many Italians are being forced to sell their second homes in the south they are still spending like there's no tomorrow.

Germany's persistent trade surplus with other EU countries is also blamed for undermining the recovery among the other 17 members, which import German goods but struggle to sell inside the EU's largest economy. This is a fairly constant refrain from The Guardian. Why blame the Germans for being successful? I think if Britain had a trade surplus with the rest of Europe neither the CBI nor Cameron would care tuppence about other countries whinging nor entertain the idea for one second of cutting back. A free market means a free market. So what exactly is the criticism meant to lead to? A controlled market where German artificially restricts its goods and buys in rubbish from her neighbours? Sounds like the old Soviet system to me. Merkel told Stiglitz and other Nobel laureates that monetary union needed to be married to fiscal union, which would provide the confidence and discipline for stained growth.

Inman of course means 'sustained'. Nevertheless this is the trap (if your a Eurosceptic) that Cameron is walking into. He thinks Merkel is an ally in 'finishing' the free market. Yes, she is, so long as there is in place greater fiscal union - harmonisation - to resurrect and old bug word from the nineties. That is the trade off Merkel is looking for from Cameron. Greater integration in return for market reforms. Something Cameron will pretend isn't on the agenda. And market reforms mean even more German goods being sold to her neighbours - including Britain. That means more household goods and more cars, and more machine tools. Just as Germany used the financial crisis to establish herself as second only to China in exports as the world recovered, so Germany will use a reformed market to cement her dominance in Europe.

Cameron can boast all he likes about the City of London, but the financial sector is no great mass employer and raiser of living standards. It is a select and narrow club of rich folk determined to make themselves richer....I find Merkel a particularly annoying personality. Overweening arrogance combined with base political cowardice (she is a former STASI officer hwo worked under Putin in East Germany). France and Italy have found the answer which is to run up their deficits to offset the huge surplus Germany is running. I think a subplot is also the emerging split on how to treat Russia. Clearly an even better way to deal with Germany is for France and Italy to develop their own relations with Russia independent from the EU dominated by Germany, Britain and the U.S.

The EU and ECB do much talking but do little in the way of action, meanwhile people continue to suffer in Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland. The EU/ECB are 5 years behind US and UK and 2 years behind Japan.The crisis has left Europe with three distinct problems: shaky public finances, crippling long-term unemployment, and limping banks. This summer’s news suggests they are coalescing to form Japanese-style vicious circle. The bond market turmoil was fixed by a dramatic intervention by the European Central Bank (ECB) in summer 2012. Interests rates for the most vulnerable economies – Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain – are down to historic lows; too low, a pessimist might argue. But the price that Germany exacted for ECB president Mario Draghi’s rescue was exorbitant: Europe-wide acceptance of a punishing austerity agenda. Even in Germany itself, where the federal government has reached fiscal balance, the pressure is now on its states, the Länder, which are struggling to balance their books by 2018. Austerity proponents such as finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble insist that squeezing public expenditure will free up private investment. But Europe’s banks, with Deutsche Bank very much in the lead, remain in a state of shell shock. Whereas the US and the UK have moved rapidly to put in place new, confidence-boosting regulation, Germany has been dragging its feet over a European banking union. As the summer ends, the sense of impasse is inescapable. Germany cannot truly prosper without a growing Europe. Europe cannot prosper without ​exporting to a buoyant German economy. But with the Christian Democrats in charge of German fiscal policy, is there any hope of change?

The EU (the 4-th Reich in fact) instigated this thing in Ukraina with a coup d'état against Ukraine's former president - and from thereon we are rolling on into a quagmire of tit-for-tat sanctions and embargoes and ultimately, an invasion by Russia, not only of Ukraine, but, the EU and NATO countries as well!

Putin will not back down especially if the west figures they have him cornered against the wall, that's when his fangs and claws will come out and rip apart everything and everybody and every entity that is against him and, particularly against HIS Russia. Read up on Wolverines! That's what Russia will become! A Wolverine! Hell be Damned, it will be Hell for Leather!

There will be no winners here, but, I'll tell you one thing for sure, the EU and the western infiltrators/meddlers will get the FIRST bloody nose out of this!

I say let the 280 some Russian trucks of AID into east Ukraine carry on to their destination! Let them go with an 'appropriate crew' for each truck, not just the driver, as Ukraine is demanding! That's idiotic of Ukraine to limit the AID with just one driver per truck! Where is Ukraine's AID, where is the UN's AID, where is the EU's AID! There's none, because all that lot want is to annihilate the ethic Russian speaking MAJORITY in that Territory! Let that AID convoy proceed and if there happens to be a 'misstep' along the way 'by the Russians', then deal with it CAREFULLY and RATIONALLY with Ukraine's national security in mind! But watch your step, Ukraine, you and the whole world are on the Brink of a World War!

I can vividly sense the HATRED of the Russian Ethnic Peoples of east Ukraine!...The miscalculation was entirely that of the EU and the West they thought they could interfere in the affairs of a foreign country without any consequences. Totally provocative of the West to aid the original rebels and then send in the US Vice President ,head of the CIA and dear old Baroness Ashton to give finacial help and advice immediately after the democratically elcted President had been ousted.

Seven years after the start of the financial crisis, banking reform is still very much a work in progress. Or should that be regression?  The only constant is that the burden of regulatory requirement and diktat keeps on growing. Little good does it seem to be doing either. Yet “job only half done” remains very much the prevailing narrative among politicians and regulators. 

Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who gave his name to a new rule that limits commercial banks from using deposits for risky proprietary trading, once confided that his rule would only work if it were kept simple enough to be written on half a page.

In the event, the final version runs to 71 pages, with a further 900 of interpretation. Try making that your bedtime reading. It is even worse in Europe, where the EU is on a mission to superimpose its own particular mix of the absurd and outright destructive on already very full national reform programmes.

Underlying this growing regulatory quagmire is the belief that legislators have not yet properly got to grips with the “too big to fail” and “too complex to manage” issues. Even before the ink has dried on the last regulatory initiative, there will inevitably be another in the making. On and on it goes, like a metastasising cancer. The idea that banks "will never be entirely safe until equity capital is expanded to 30pc of lending" is as barking as any other estimate. Neither she, nor I, nor you, nor anyone else can predict the future and while 30% provides a better buffer than 29% or 28% it is not as 'safe' as 31% or 32%. Striving for a mythical 'safety' level is strictly for vote catching.

Given that 450+ US retail banks failed after 2008 it is not clear Why anyone still thinks they are not the casinos? While politicians still imagine that retail banks are safe but investment banks are unsafe they will not be able to understand the numbers and make the right decisions, however unpopular those are bound to be with their voting fodder.

Growth in the single currency region came to a halt between April and June, raising alarm bells about the impact of an escalation of the crisis in Ukraine.  Official figures showed that Germany’s economy  shrank by a worse than expected 0.2 per cent while France endured its second quarter of zero growth.  Meanwhile Italy, the eurozone’s third largest economy, fell back into recession for the third time since 2008, overshadowing improvements in Portugal and Spain.   Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said some of Germany’s problems may have been temporary but there was a risk of the eurozone sliding into a triple-dip recession as confidence was dented by worries about sanctions against Russia.  He added: “Not only will an escalating crisis hit risk appetite but sanctions are also likely to have some impact on Europe’s economies in coming months.”  The European Central Bank will now come under increasing pressure to step up stimulus measures by pumping money into the economy. France piled pressure on the European Central Bank to do more to boost growth on Thursday after news that economic activity across the 18-nation single currency area came to a halt in the second quarter. With France registering zero growth for a second successive quarter, Michel Sapin, the country's finance minister, halved his growth forecast for this year, abandoned the deficit reduction target and said it was up to the Frankfurt-based ECB to respond to an "exceptional situation of weak growth and weak inflation across the eurozone". Sapin's demand came as the latest figures from Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency, showed that problems in the single currency's Big Three economies – Germany, France and Italy – resulted in no increase in eurozone gross domestic product in the three months to June. That compares with an increase of 0.2% in the first quarter. However financial markets saw no immediate prospect of the ECB launching its own money creation (quantitative easing) programme until next year at the earliest, amid concerns that countries such as France and Italy would row back on structural reform if fresh growth-boosting stimulus policies were introduced. The interest rate – or yield – on 10-year German bonds briefly fell below 1% for the first time as dealers anticipated a protracted period of low growth, low inflation and low interest rates. Markets already knew that Italian output had contracted by 0.2% in the second quarter but were surprised by a similar-sized fall in Germany, which was hurt by a more challenging climate for its key export sector. France made it clear it blamed foot-dragging on the part of the ECB for the failure of the eurozone's second-biggest economy as it reduced its growth forecast for 2014 from 1% to 0.5% and ditched the 1.7% forecast for 2015, saying it would not expand by much more than 1%.