Dates in the legal framework of German monetary policy 1948 - 2007

Germany's net external position stood at €1,476 billion at the end of 2015, and thus amounted to around 49 % of gross domestic product. The German net external asset position rose by €302 billion year-on-year.

The effectiveness of monetary policy greatly depends on the operations agreed for this purpose being conducted in a timely and confidential manner. For all operations performed with non-capital instruments, Article 1 (6) MiFIR therefore requires members of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB) to obtain an explicit exemption from the obligation to publish trade data when implementing monetary policy in line with their statutory powers. 

For further information, please refer to Bundesbank Circular No 53/2017.

Bundesbank Executive Board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele considers Bitcoin a risky and highly speculative form of investment. "It’s also possible for Bitcoin holdings to be completely wiped out," he writes in an op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In addition, he draws attention to Bitcoin’s high level of energy consumption, citing Bundesbank estimates that settling a Bitcoin transaction uses roughly 460,000 times as much electricity as a normal transfer.