“It was never meant to be like this. A reunified Germany, at the heart of an expanding European Union and single currency, was supposed to offer a decent, stronger alternative to the “casino capitalism” that Germans have long thought of as represented by the US model that they love to hate.

When the credit crunch first broke in the autumn of 2007, bringing banks such as Northern Rock down almost immediately, the Germans allowed themselves a quiet chuckle of schadenfreude along the lines of “we told you so”.

But that was before the financial crisis swept through Germany’s banking system, which turned out to have had its tentacles deep into the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States. And it was before the collapse in world trade that Germany had previously depended on to drive its economy.”

“The Opel crisis is part of a much wider problem.”