When the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s warned this week that it might lower the credit ratings of 15 euro zone countries, including Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed unmoved. “What a rating agency does is the responsibility of the rating agency,” she told NY Times reporters in Berlin.
It was the kind of impervious reaction to market gyrations that many critics said was at the core of the euro crisis. Mrs. Merkel, they say, has rarely acted quickly or boldly enough to halt the downward spiral of the euro. To American officials, Mrs. Merkel, 57, seems at times shockingly aloof about market turmoil. But as European leaders prepare for crucial meetings this week in Brussels, what may have seemed like timid or even bumbling leadership is looking more like a consistent strategy of brinkmanship aimed at remaking the euro zone in Germany’s likeness.
At critical junctures throughout the crisis, Mrs. Merkel has resisted appeals to appease the financial markets by lowering borrowing costs. Instead, she has wielded the pain of soaring interest rates as a cudgel to extract painful changes — and demand leadership changes — in countries like Greece and Italy that have proven resistant to those changes in the past. It is a clever strategy, one that allows her to juggle divergent interests at home, where the German people do not want her offering more guarantees of taxpayer money to combat the sovereign debt crisis, and abroad, where they are begging her to do so. It is also highly risky…
Wait, wait…there’s more at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/world/europe/angela-merkel-nears-a-remaking-of-euro-zone.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
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