Topics: House price increases since 2010: determinants and regional dependencies, Macroeconomic approaches for assessing price competitiveness, International cooperation in the area of financial sector policies – the Financial Stability Board

Effective immediately, the Deutsche Bundesbank is offering an optimised version of its website for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The Bundesbank has adapted its website to respond to different screen sizes, providing tablet and smartphone users with quicker access to current topics and content. The desktop view, on the other hand, is unchanged.

Germany’s financial links with the rest of the world continued to increase in 2012.

Since the beginning of 2011, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) have been observing and analysing the impact of the stricter international capital rules and the new liquidity standards (Basel III) in semi-annual “Basel III monitoring exercises”.

The Deutsche Bundesbank is rolling out a large-scale information campaign this Saturday to inform the public about the introduction of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Print advertisements and web banners featuring a variety of themes will be published in order to further the preparations for the new European payments regime.

In April 2013, a survey of foreign exchange and derivatives market activity was carried out by central banks in 53 countries, including all the major financial centres.In consultation with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), these surveys have been carried out every three years since 1989.

At the end of the first quarter of 2013, the financial assets of households rose by €52 billion, or 1.1%, on the previous quarter to just under €4,992 billion. The acquisition of financial assets was comparable to the first quarters of the previous years, with only a small percentage of this increase, around €5 billion, attributable to capital market gains.

On the whole, the credit standards of German credit institutions for lending to non-financial corporations remained unchanged in the second quarter of 2013. This was revealed by the latest Bank Lending Survey conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank.

In the first half of 2013 the Bundesbank detected around 19,500 counterfeit euro banknotes. This means that the number of counterfeits was down by 13.6 per cent compared with the second half of 2012.

The Deutsche Bundesbank calculates the basic rate of interest pursuant to section 247 (1) of the German Civil Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) and publishes its current level in the Federal Gazette (Bundesanzeiger) pursuant to section 247 (2) of the German Civil Code.