2011 saw a continuation of the trend towards building up multinational groups by way of holding companies.

The emerging market economies have grown significantly over the past 20 years, increasingly becoming the engine fuelling global growth. Recently, however, economic momentum in China, Russia and other countries has tailed off considerably. In the July Monthly Report, the Bundesbank's economists look into the drivers behind this development.

The foreign direct investment stocks reached a new peak at year-end 2017. In 2017, Germany’s primary outward foreign direct investment (FDI) grew considerably by €61 billion and reached a new peak of €1,167 billion at the end of that year. In the opposite direction, inward FDI in Germany rose by €32 billion, likewise achieving its highest ever recorded value (€741 billion).

The German economy has picked up momentum. Aggregate output is expanding at a faster pace again after an interruption due to the escalation of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area. The driving forces are changing, however. While external impulses had the upper hand following the economic and financial crisis, domestic economic activity has come to fore recently.

In its latest Monthly Report, the Bundesbank presents a detailed outlook for the German economy in 2015 and 2016, which was already published at the beginning of June. Additional focus lies on new instruments for measuring inflation expectations as well as on marketable financial instruments of banks and their role as collateral in the Eurosystem.

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.