The European sovereign debt crisis was characterised by the fact that some euro area countries, owing to their high levels of debt – caused in part by efforts to counter the consequences of the global financial crisis – experienced difficulties refinancing their debt and, in some cases, lost access to capital market funding. In order to protect monetary policy transmission and safeguard sufficient liquidity provision for the financial system, the ECB Governing Council adopted various non-standard measures during the course of the crisis that went beyond the scope of the usual operational framework at that time.

The Eurosystem’s monetary policy measures in the years following the European sovereign debt crisis were shaped, in particular, by a prolonged period in which inflation rates were well below the Eurosystem’s target. Against this backdrop, the ECB Governing Council decided, starting in 2014, to conduct various targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs) and launch temporary monetary policy purchase programmes in addition to the existing operational framework.

Prior to the global financial crisis starting in 2007, the Eurosystem’s operational framework for implementing monetary policy used to be a corridor system. This involved the ECB Governing Council setting three interest rates, which usually had the same distance from each other. The rates of the deposit facility and the marginal lending facility formed the lower and upper bounds of the corridor, respectively. The relevant key interest rate on the main refinancing operations was the middle of the interest rate corridor. This system aimed to steer short-term money market rates close to the main refinancing operations rate.

With the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007 and the turmoil it brought about in the international banking system, trust between commercial banks increasingly dwindled, which significantly hampered the redistribution of liquidity via the interbank market that is necessary for a functioning corridor system. Banks in the euro area began to hoard liquidity or not lend it indiscriminately to banks that were in need of liquidity, meaning that the short-term money market no longer facilitated the smooth distribution of liquidity. The volatility of short-term interest rates went up significantly. As a result, the ECB Governing Council adopted a series of non-standard monetary policy measures, thereby changing the way in which the operational framework is used to implement monetary policy.

The Eurosystem’s operational framework for implementing monetary policy comprises the general rules for Eurosystem monetary policy instruments and procedures, by means of which the ECB Governing Council’s decisions on the implementation of monetary policy in the euro area are enacted in a decentralised manner. The Eurosystem’s monetary policy operations are executed under uniform terms and conditions in all Member States. The Bundesbank is responsible for conducting the Eurosystem’s monetary policy operations with German counterparties.

The statistics on the money markets is on money market transactions, namely on secured, unsecured and certain derivatives money market transactions, concluded by monetary financial institutions (MFIs), with the exception of money market funds.

The purpose of CERT-Bundesbank is to promptly detect anomalies as well as attacks from internal and external sources.

The MaSanV details the requirements for the design of recovery plans, the content of simplified requirements for recovery plans, and the application process, conditions and the design of recovery plans by institutional protection schemes.

MMSR is a transaction-by-transaction dataset about the Euro money market. Data contains detailed information about the secured and unsecured money market, foreign exchange swaps and Euro overnight index (EONIA) swaps. The German subset of the data, to which Deutsche Bundesbank provides access, comprises 115 reporting agents domiciled in Germany.

Here you will find all publications on the subject of "External debt".

As to the investment fund statistics, comprehensive information is collected on funds open to the general public, specialised funds and closed-end funds which were created by domestic investment companies pursuant to the Kapitalanlagegesetzbuch.

Bank profit and loss statistics provide data on the income and expenditure of MFIs on an annual basis. This involves the evaluation of the profits and losses calculated from the annual accounts which the banks must submit to the Bundesbank pursuant to section 26 of the Banking Act (Kreditwesengesetz).

The Zentralkartei Banken (ZentK) is the database where the master data for the institutes with reporting obligations (MFIs, their foreign branches and subsidiaries as well as the multi-office banks) are administered chronologically and therefore their codification in all surveys of the banking statistics.

Notes

Notes on methodology

The "payments" section includes data on the payment systems employed and transaction volumes as well as statistics on securities settlement systems.

Asset purchases can be a monetary policy measure to raise the inflation rate to the desired level in a low interest rate environment. The following film explains how this works.

The following text provides an overview of the regulations regarding the reproduction of banknotes and coins.

Notes

Director General Audit

Here you can find a wide range of information that is particularly useful for new participants, as well as the TARGET registration form, which must be completed for the initial registration but also for any subsequent amendments.