At today’s meeting, the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank gave Dr Joachim Nagel permission to depart from the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank prior to the end of his term with effect from 30 April 2016 and mandated a cooling-off period of six months. Dr Nagel’s areas of responsibility have been temporarily distributed among the other members of the Executive Board.

In the first quarter of 2016, German credit institutions adjusted their lending policies in the three surveyed lines of business in a variety of ways, as is revealed by the latest Bank Lending Survey (BLS) conducted among banks domiciled in Germany.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis in summer 2007, it has become a particularly challenging endeavour to analyse and forecast price developments. In Germany, as in most of the other large industrial countries, the inflation rate fell considerably during the Great Recession. Once the economy rebounded, inflation went up again rather quickly until the end of 2011; in 2012, it fell noticeably again and has remained surprisingly low amidst the positive developments in the labour market.

As at the end of December 2015, households' financial assets amounted to €5,318 billion; this figure was €105 billion (or 2.0%) higher than at the end of the third quarter.

Last year saw a continuation of the consolidation process in the German banking sector. Over the course of 2015, the overall number of credit institutions (in Germany) fell by 30 to 1,960 institutions. This corresponds to a 1.5% decline in 2015 compared with a drop of 1.9% in 2014.

According to provisional calculations, general government debt in Germany as defined in the Maastricht Treaty amounted to roughly €2.153 trillion at the end of 2015. The debt level was thus down by €24 billion on the year. The debt ratio, meaning the ratio of debt to nominal gross domestic product (GDP), fell by 3.5 percentage points to 71.2%. Nominal GDP growth contributed 2.7 percentage points to this decrease.

The Bundesbank is expanding its provision of data on the domestic investment fund industry. In addition to the long-standing publications on open-end investment funds, from now on data on the closed-end fund sector in Germany will also be published on a monthly basis.