In a speech to her fellow Christian Democrats at a party congress this week, Merkel said Germany had been well-served in the past 60 years by a reliance on fiscal responsibility and the Social Market Economy – a system which she said ought to be exported to other countries in order to avert such turmoil in the future. The Chancellor also said her government would not join a ‘’senseless race’’ to spend billions in a bid to boost the flagging economy. Money Talks asked Prof. Irvin Collier of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin for his response to the Chancellor’s comments.

Interviewer: Ranjitha Balasubramanyam