You may have been thinking that the German economy has gone for a Burton, and if you're British, you may have been sniggering at the so-called power-house of Europe creaking and croaking like an old virgin at it's 10% unemployment and it's less-than-1% growth rate, while the unfastidious English have been getting rich selling people more Italian sandwiches and cartons of coffee than a rational society should need.

But you'd be wrong, because the German bet that making things that are actually useful - machine parts and power-saws, for instance - may be reaping unforeseen dividends. They sell them to booming countries, because other countries, like China, need good machines for their over-enthusiastic production and mad economic expansion. Hamburg is making a mint exporting German industrial parts, and with new labour reforms demanding more from the workers, the figures are beginning to swing in favour of the teutonic tortoise again.