Readers of the Financial Times will be familiar with the paradox that Germany, probably the biggest winner from globalisation among rich countries, is at the same time a deep well of paranoia about and veritable fount of vituperation against the sources of its riches.

Thus, just as the country’s statistics office announces that the economy has grown at the fastest quarterly rate for 12 years, Horst Köhler, Germany’s president, tells an interviewer that “international markets have developed into a monster that must be put back in its place”.

As presidential gaffes go, this can hardly compete with George “I’m a war president” Bush’s revelation this week that in solidarity with the troops in Iraq he, er, gave up golf. Nevertheless, Mr Köhler has, as it were, “monstered” the good news story, blowing it clean off the radar.

Despite once being head of the International Monetary Fund, Mr Köhler has definite form on monsters. “Globalisation is a reality, but one with the ability to mutate into a monster”, he said in 2005.

That might be seen as prescient, given the shape-shifting features of the subprime crisis, and the alchemical ability of bankers to turn dross into gold – and then back again. Mr Köhler may even be right that bank regulators need a new set of teeth. But Germany’s political class clearly has a thing about the awesome beast that is capitalism.

Only a few months ago, Peer Steinbrück, the finance minister, was fulminating against Nokia, accusing the Finnish mobile phone-maker of “caravan capitalism”: it had shut a plant in Germany and relocated production to Romania.

More vividly, Franz Müntefering, the former Social Democrat leader, flayed hedge funds in 2005 as “swarms of locusts”. Such apocalyptic rhetoric leads us to suspect Berlin is contemplating some Biblical form of regulation, such as Isaiah’s prescription: “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.