All right. Hello, everyone and welcome to this conversation about the German economy and about a book that was published last year on Germany's economic misery and why the country

find itself in a structural economic slump.

The book is titled Caput, The End of the German Miracle, and it's one book that I can

highly recommend to anyone with an interest, not just in the German economy, but in many of these structural

changes that nowadays shape economic performance of many mature industrial economies.

And I am delighted to be joined today by the author of this book, which is no one else

then, Wolfgang Munchau.

Wolfgang has been a journalist and writer for several decades.

Many of us will know him from his time as associated editor and columnist in the Financial Times,

but he has for some time now led his own economic intelligence company called Eurointelligence.

And he writes a column for the new statesman in the UK.

And in the past weeks, I have also watched him on the unheard media platform.

Wolfgang, welcome.

Frederick, thank you for the invitation.

I am very much looking forward to this conversation because I think it's not just a very

topical theme, but it's also, I think what you have is a really great book which I enjoyed

immensely reading.

And even if I pride myself, even if I'm not a German, I pipe myself following German economy

quite closely, I learned a lot from I'm myself following German economy quite closely.

I learned a lot from it, which is why I recommend it to a lot of people that I've talked to since the book came out.

And I should also commend you for the excellent timing of the book, because if I'm not mistaken, the day after you launched your book,

the German government actually collapsed when the Liberal Party decided to leave the current coalition after a few years.

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