Rise of the Fourth Reich, how Germany is using the financial crisis to conquer Europe

Yesterday's crisis meeting between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy was arranged before the participants knew of the disastrous growth figures in the Eurozone that emerged in the morning.

The background to the meeting was last week's tumult in the world financial markets. Shares had gone into freefall after the downgrading of America's credit rating.

Worse than that, however, were the tremors rattling some of Europe's most important banks, notably in France, caused by further evidence of the utter failure of even the more developed European economies to live anything like within their means.