Forget trying to change any country You know the mantra. Germany should take expansionary measures. The US should take bigger steps to reduce its budget deficit. China should expand domestic demand and import more. Developing countries such as India should be more welcoming to foreign capital. The UK government should curb its enthusiasm for austerity. Pick up almost any economic report and you will find these and similar recommendations. Look at international communiqués and statements from august bodies and you will find them there, too. The one snag is that they are not going to happen. Worse than that, advice of a deflationary and contractionary variety can be forced on countries in difficulties - such as the weaker eurozone members, which are victims of the so-called troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. There is no way of forcing the advice of these bodies on powerful surplus countries. Thus the whole system has a deflationary bias when the world least needs it. Samuel Brittan The one large country that has acted partly in line with the international consensus is Japan, which yesterday surprised and pleased markets by announcing an aggressive policy of monetary easing. But this was not because of the international consensus. Rather, it was because a new government has decided to try and put an end to years of stagnation. The Japanese authorities deny that the depreciation of the yen has been a deliberate policy rather than a spontaneous market reaction. Similarly, the Chinese current surplus has almost vanished, due more to depressed markets for the country's exports than because of international pressure. Germany offers another example of the ineffectiveness of consensus. For many years, it has been under pressure to expand home demand. I do not want to endorse the rigid pre-Keynesian orthodoxy that has descended on German policy, which is scant reward for the vigorous campaign conducted by Keynes in the 1920s against the burden of reparations imposed on Germany in the Versailles treaty. The moves to make a balanced budget a constitutional requirement suggest that the country's leaders have imported an economic Bourbonism from their French neighbours. Policy may relax a little after the country's elections this year, but don't hold your breath. For it cannot be said that Germany has done at all badly in rejecting the conventional wisdom. Its inflation rate is slightly under 2 per cent. It registered a negative growth rate in the last quarter of 2012 but this will almost certainly turn out to have been an outlier. Its unemployment rate of less than 6 per cent may not be entirely satisfactory but it is well below that of the US or the UK, or indeed any of its EU partners with the exception of the Netherlands, with which it is closely allied. But what stands out a mile is its current account surplus, estimated at 7 per cent of gross domestic product. (The fact that I even know this shows how far the eurozone is from being a genuine economic union. Can anyone tell me the balance of payments of Sussex or Schleswig Holstein or Oklahoma?) If by some miracle the old Deutschmark could be restored, it would certainly float upwards. Some have suggested that Germany should "temporarily" leave the euro and come back at a higher rate. This is a perfect example of economics without politics. If this advice were taken, there would almost certainly be no euro to come back to, which would not worry me, but should worry enthusiasts for the single currency. The general point I want to make is that it is best to take German policy as a given rather than to try to lecture the country into something else. This point was made clear at the ill-fated Bonn conference of 1968 when Roy Jenkins, then UK chancellor of the exchequer, vainly called for a Deutschmark revaluation to complement the earlier British devaluation. He failed. It was the only time that I remember the normally equable Jenkins losing his cool, slamming his car door shut, remarking "I have nothing to say." Eventually Germany did revalue modestly in its own good time. The problem was eventually taken care of after 1973 by the all too short period of floating exchange rates. Ultimately, governments need to act "selfishly" to safeguard their own citizens. There are of course good and bad ways of doing this. The wrong route taken in the 1930s was a proliferation of trade restrictions, make-work policies and so on. The critical aspect is what is known as "currency wars" or the more ungainly "competitive devaluation." If the main weapon is monetary policy the harm done may be minimal. Indeed, if efforts in this direction cancel out, the main effect could be some much needed international monetary expansion. The general moral is that - except when conferring at high-level international meetings - national policy makers should treat the behaviour of other governments as being what econometricians call exogenous. In other words, they had better accept the world.