“Excessively cheap money in the US was a driver of today's crisis,” the chancellor told the German parliament. “I am deeply concerned about whether we are now reinforcing this trend through measures being adopted in the US and elsewhere and whether we could find ourselves in five years facing the exact same crisis.”

It is the first time Ms Merkel has confronted her critics head-on. There have been calls from outside the country for Germany to beef up its fiscal support to the economy, in part because its vast current account surplus and healthy public finances give it more room for manoeuvre than other European nations.

Yet Ms Merkel has been wary of raising public borrowing to stimulate demand. She fears the extra income could boost Germans' already high savings rate while physical bottlenecks may prevent massive rises in infrastructure budgets being spent.