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Schäuble compared the present financial crisis with the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years earlier. “The financial crisis will change the world as powerfully as did the fall of the [Berlin] Wall. The balance between America, Asia and Europe is shifting dramatically,”

But just look at the differences between the area’s member-states.  The German debt would be 40 per cent of GDP, the Dutch debt 37 per cent, the Finnish debt 12 per cent.  But the Greek debt would be 150 per cent, the Irish debt 126 per cent and the Portuguese debt 89 per cent.

This risky policy, she thinks, was supported by a US government that also rejected any calls - including from Germany when Berlin was chairing the Group of Eight industrial nations in 2007 - for tighter regulation of financial markets. Ms Merkel "sees the huge amounts of liquidity being pumped into financial systems with some concern. She is worried that some of the unconventional action being deployed by central banks cannot be easily reversed," says one confidant. "We do not want to be fuelling a new bubble. Another crisis like this one and the west will be wiped out."

The result of these enormous expenditures and of the absence of urgently needed coal and steel from the Ruhr was the complete collapse of the German currency. The mark, already highly inflated, was trading at 21,000 marks per US dollar at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year, when inflation reached its peak, the rate was almost 6 trillion marks to a dollar—a figure with twelve zeros.