In the latest Monthly Report, the Bundesbank’s payment specialists look at distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Maschinelles Lernen, künstliche Intelligenz und der digitale Euro – beim Branchentreffen BaFinTech haben die Bundesbankvorstände Joachim Wuermeling und Burkhard Balz über Chancen und Risiken der Digitalisierung von Bankgeschäften und digitales Zentralbankgeld gesprochen. Das Format BaFinTech richtete sich an Vertreterinnen und Vertreter der Finanzindustrie.

Households’ financial assets grew by €159 billion to €7,325 billion in the second quarter of 2021. Alongside the transaction-related increase in financial assets (acquisition of financial assets), valuation gains on shares and investment fund shares played a significant role.

The advantages or disadvantages firms experience as a result of their size, referred to in the economic literature as returns to scale, are of central importance in many economic models. Increasing returns to scale, whereby unit costs decrease as output volume increases, could explain productivity differences between Europe and the United States. We present fresh evidence on the returns to scale of European firms: most exhibit constant returns to scale, but a non-trivial share also show increasing returns to scale.