As a young woman growing up in the former East Germany, Angela Merkel had a front-row seat on the follies and foibles of an overly planned economy.

Today, in her post-Communist incarnation as chancellor of a reunified Germany, Merkel has witnessed up-close the follies and foibles of economies that seem to lack any effective planning or regulation whatsoever.

In an exclusive interview in Wednesday’s Financial Times newspaper, Merkel delivers a scathing indictment of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model gone awry.

She says regulations have failed and that Europe should step into the breach with its own rules of governance better tailored to Europe’s rising economic models.

The German Chancellor has always been seen as a straight-talker; so none of these blunt words should come as a surprise.

But you can really feel her indignation at Europe’s failure to forge its own alternatives to the dysfunctional models of finance and regulation that triggered the current crisis.

It bears repeating that Germany is Europe’s pacesetting economy, as well as the world's - yes, the world's - largest exporter.

And, as the FT points out, it's been staging a remarkable economic recovery after nearly three years being branded the sick man of Europe.

It's created over a million and a half new jobs and boasts low-single-digit unemployment that is the envy of many of its neighbors. So Germany obviously has a major vested interest in shielding itself from the ravages of the US economic contagion.

Meanwhile, Europe itself just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the European Central Bank. The single currency it spawned, the euro, almost a decade old itself, is indisputably the bank's crowning achievement.

Merkel has been a staunch defender of the ECB’s independence – a viewpoint that has put her at odds with her French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy. To many, Sarkozy’s slights about the strong euro – and his insinuations that the ECB should do something about it – are a dangerous encroachment on the Bank’s precious autonomy.

Merkel also feels that the ECB and the euro are under-appreciated by the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ financial system’s boosters.

She wants to see the scales adjusted to take account of this.

As she put it in the Financial Times interview: "Europe has developed a certain independence thanks to the euro. But...we still have a strongly Anglo-Saxon dominated system. The robust currency system of the euro has not yet secured sufficient influence over the rules governing financial markets."

She also reiterates a German demand for a European ratings agency that could bring new standards of transparency to credit assessments.

Some might argue that it’s a little rich for Merkel to bash the US model when Germany itself has often played the risk game so willingly.

Germany's public banks, the FT notes, were among the first dominos to fall in the subprime squeeze that subsequently spread across the rest of Europe. They took on big risks and presumably knew (or thought they knew) what they were doing.

Merkel also acknowledges that the image of German business itself has been tainted in recent months with corruption scandals at former paragons of corporate probity such as Siemens and Volkswagen, and amid allegations that an entire class of affluent Germans evaded taxes by hording cash in fiscal havens such as Liechtenstein.

But the German chancellor wants Europe to assert more control over its economic destiny in the years ahead - rather than paying fealty to someone else’s financial diktat.