ABSTRACT
Global financial markets link all macroeconomic policies into a common net, with traders everywhere generating ripple effects for every government and central bank action. Global commercial markets are equally pervasive, and those that exclude themselves from competition do so at their long-term peril. The United States and Germany, often the two largest exporting states in the world and two of the three most important economies, have placed particular stress on trying to coordinate their policies and those of others. With the end of the cold war, therefore, the economic element may well become the most important foundation for German-American relations and a crucial element in their cooperation. The coordination of German-American economic policy, whether on trade or monetary issues, thus looms as a thorny and probably contentious question that will complicate relations continually and probably increasingly.
