The head of Europe’s biggest economy said Thursday that world leaders should be looking at the massive U.S. deficit and other economic imbalances, not just problems caused by financial markets, as they debate a new global order.

Speaking at a conference in Paris on the future of capitalism, German Chancellor Angela Merkel singled out the American budget deficit and China’s current account surplus ”” the difference between exports and imports ”” as problems upsetting the global economy.

“We would be making an error if we were content to look solely at financial markets,” she said.

Read it all.

He did so by stepping in front of a train. Sad.

One day near the middle of the last century a minister in a prison camp in Germany conducted a service for the other prisoners. One of those prisoners, an English officer who survived, wrote these words:

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident, and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive”¦ He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near”¦ On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions it had brought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” That had only one meaning for all prisoners”“the gallows. We said good-bye to him. He took me aside: “This is the end; but for me it is the beginning of life.” The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.”

Germany said on Sunday it would guarantee all private German bank accounts ”“ currently worth €568bn ”“ in a dramatic move to prevent panic withdrawals as fears over the worldwide financial crisis spread to Europe’s largest economy.

“We want to tell people that their savings are safe,” Angela Merkel, chancellor, said at an unscheduled press conference on Sunday. The scheme would cover existing accounts and others which savers might open….

German officials said the move was agreed because of fear that the crisis at Hypo Real Estate ”“ a listed mortgage and public sector lender, whose government-backed €35bn ($48bn, £27bn) rescue collapsed at the weekend ”“ would lead to widespread panic on Monday.

Read it all.