President Obama embraces troubled German ally

"Governments need to be able to point to the light at the end of the tunnel," says Simon Tilford, chief economist with the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank that supports European integration. Tilford says Greece and the other ailing economies are denied, by their use of the euro, the normal tools countries might use to address deep deficits, such as devaluing currency by printing money. "I don't think the US can or should place too many hopes in Germany performing the kind of international role that this administration and previous ones have hoped it would That's not going to happen. Germany's slashing its defence budget."