December 6, 2011
When the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s warned this week that it might lower the credit ratings of 15 euro zone countries, including Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed unmoved. “What a rating agency does is the responsibility of the rating agency,” she told reporters in Berlin on Tuesday.
It was the kind of impervious reaction to market gyrations that many critics said was at the core of the euro crisis. Mrs. Merkel, they say, has rarely acted quickly or boldly enough to halt the downward spiral of the euro.
To American officials, Mrs. Merkel, 57, seems at times shockingly aloof about market turmoil. But as European leaders prepare for crucial meetings this week in Brussels, what may have seemed like timid or even bumbling leadership is looking more like a consistent strategy of brinkmanship aimed at remaking the euro zone in Germany’s likeness.
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