All right, Alexander, let's talk about the political and the economic situation in Germany.

And we'll talk a bit about the UK as well.

I think there's some interesting things that we can talk about with regards to the Stammer administration.

But let's start things off with the Mertz administration.

How is Germany doing?

How is their economy doing?

How is Chancellor Mertz doing?

Well, one of the things that Mertz always sold himself as was the great free market,

Pertmann, the person who knew economics, who is the person who would manage to get

the German economy, moving again, who would bring Germany back to the kind of economic

policies that Germany followed in the 1950s with Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, the time of the

German economic miracle, that, would do away with regulation, that he would restore fiscal discipline, that he would do all of these kind of things.

He's doing none of those things. We've now had a budget.

And the new German government's budget is above 3% of GDP.

In fact, I believe it's 3.2% of GDP.

So it violates the Maastricht criteria which Germany has imposed and insisted upon in the past

that other countries must follow.

Well, Germany is now, as I said, itself, violating mastery.

But even that doesn't really come close to matching the reality,

because since Germany has now done away, in effect, with its debt break,

it's now going to spend fast amounts of money off the books on all kinds of programs, on infrastructure, on increasing defense spending, on all of these things.

And it's going to happen.

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