A lengthy piece by George Packer on the German Chancellor
Angela Merkel:
George Packer notes:
“Merkel is obsessed
with demography and economic competitiveness. She loves reading charts. In
September, one of her senior aides showed me a stack of them that the
Chancellor had just been examining; they showed the relative performance of different
European economies across a variety of indicators. In unit-labor costs, he
pointed out, Germany lies well below the euro-zone average. But the population
of Germany—the largest of any nation in Europe—is stagnant and aging. “A
country like that cannot run up more and more debt,” the senior aide said.”