The president of the Deutsche Bundesbank has said the recent surge in public spending in Germany will do little to raise the country’s low growth potential.

Speaking at the Bank of Latvia’s economic conference in Riga on November 11, Joachim Nagel put Germany’s potential annual growth at around 0.3–0.4%, a pace he described as “too weak”. Instead of relying on one-off measures, such as infrastructure investment or higher defence spending, that were unlikely to boost long-term output, he called