I would also introduce a german car tax where all german imports attract a 10% extra fee.

An interesting proposal, but the rationale escapes me.

One of the big mistakes made by all western governments during the recession was to bail out the banks with public money. The public will be paying for this for years to come. This decision was made because these governments believed that capitalism as a system should be protected at all costs. By making this decision, they defeated the very essence of capitalism, of allowing free markets to operate and to allow businesses that made unsustainable losses to sink.

What the governments should ideally have done was to take-over just one bank and use that bank to prop up the banking system and credit markets. So for e.g., the British government could have used Northern Rock to ensure that viable businneses get the credit they needed and that credit worthy mortgagees and borrowers keep getting access to the funds they needed. This would have allowed the banks which racked up large losses to fail, without affecting the wider economy.

This would have helped the government avoid racking up the kind of public debts that have been created and then letting banks go back to the merry old ways of big bonuses and big risks.