As former head of the International Monetary Fund, German President Horst Köhler is well qualified to comment on the global financial crisis. In an interview, he described financial markets as a "monster" and said the global financial system "came close to collapse."

German President Horst Köhler: "We came close to a collapse of the global financial markets." Capitalism -- at least in its dreaded red-in-tooth-and-claw Anglo-Saxon variety -- is not cool in Germany, it seems. All across the political spectrum, it is hard to find any German politician with a good word to say about financial markets, hedge funds and the dreaded speculators -- especially in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis (more...).

Franz Müntefering, the former chairman of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), added a new term to the German political lexicon in 2005 when he described private equity firms as "locusts." Current SPD leader Kurt Beck warned of the dangers of neo-liberalism in a 2007 essay (more...) for the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Even an über-capitalist like Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann commented recently that the markets were incapable of resolving the financial crisis by themselves (more...).

Now Germany's President Horst Köhler has entered the fray in a hard-hitting interview with the weekly magazine Stern. Coining a term which is likely to become as popular as the infamous locusts, Köhler, who belongs to Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, said that the search for profits has turned the markets into a "monster."