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.

The Bundesbank posted a profit of €3.2 billion for the 2015 financial year, up from €3.0 billion in 2014. This profit was transferred in full today to the Federal Government of Germany pursuant to section 27 number 2 of the Bundesbank Act (Bundesbankgesetz). Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann explained that the higher profit had been driven by an improved net result of financial operations, write-downs and risk provisioning, while net interest income had declined.