General government debt in Germany was down in 2018 by €52 billion, amounting to €2.063 trillion at the end of the year. The debt ratio, meaning the ratio of debt to nominal gross domestic product (GDP), fell from 64.5% to 60.9%.

The Executive Board notified the Federal Government that it had no objections to the Federal Cabinet’s nomination.

The Bundesbank posted a profit of €2.5 billion for the 2018 financial year. Following an allocation to the reserves, the Bundesbank transferred the remaining distributable profit of €2.4 billion in full to the Federal Ministry of Finance.

Cash is a quick and cheap means of payment in the German retail trade sector. On average, cash payments take just over 22 seconds and cost around 24 cent per transaction, according to a study on the costs of cash payments in the retail trade sector which the Deutsche Bundesbank carried out in cooperation with EHI Retail Institute.

In 2018, the Bundesbank registered approximately 58,000 counterfeit euro banknotes with a nominal value of €3.4 million, representing a 20% decrease year on year. Statistically, this equates to seven counterfeit banknotes per 10,000 inhabitants.

German banks made hardly any changes to their lending policies in the final quarter of 2018. Credit standards remained virtually constant in all three loan categories. At the same time, banks’ overall credit terms and conditions for loans to enterprises and for loans to households for house purchase were eased slightly.

Das Geldvermögen der privaten Haushalte in Deutschland lag zum Ende des dritten Quartals 2018 bei 6 053 Mrd €, womit es gegenüber dem zweiten Quartal um 76 Mrd € oder 1,3 % anstieg.

The Deutsche Bundesbank calculates the basic rate of interest and publishes its current level in the Federal Gazette (Bundesanzeiger).

Times of strong growth and low interest rates have seen vulnerabilities build up in the German financial system. In addition, the probability of an economic downturn has increased. “Now is the time to build up sufficient capital and strengthen the financial system’s defences,” said Bundesbank Vice-President Claudia Buch at the press conference on the publication of the new Financial Stability Review.

The Bundesbank and Deutsche Börse have successfully completed tests for their jointly specified blockchain prototypes. The outcome of the project is that the prototypes are suitable for productive operation and can serve as a basis for further development.

German banks have once again slightly eased their credit standards for loans to enterprises and loans to households for house purchase. These are, in a nutshell, the results of the Bank Lending Survey (BLS) in Germany, which the Bundesbank conducts four times a year.

At the end of the second quarter of 2018, the financial assets of households in Germany stood at €5,997 billion. Compared with the first quarter of 2018, this represents an increase of €80 billion or 1.4%. Investors continued to favour liquid investments as well as forms of investment that are perceived to be low risk – with inflows of €43 billion, currency and deposits saw the largest gains, and claims on insurance corporations also recorded significant inflows amounting to €18 billion.

Germany’s net external position stood at €1,771 billion at the end of 2017, thus amounting to around 54% of nominal gross domestic product.

The results of the payments statistics for 2017 show that payments are becoming more digital and are increasingly made within Europe. More than 21 billion non-cash payments were made in Germany last year – around 3% more than the year before. These payments were executed on approximately 103 million current accounts. The average balance on these accounts thus rose by almost 12% to around €13,000.

Dr Sabine Mauderer and Burkhard Balz took up office as members of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank on Monday. The Bundesbank's Executive Board has therefore reshuffled its areas of responsibility.

Deutsche Börse and the Bundesbank are jointly exploring ways to employ blockchain technology in securities settlement. They unveiled a new prototype in Frankfurt am Main.

The consultation of the Deutsche Bundesbank's Executive Board pursuant to section 7 (3) of the Bundesbank Act regarding the nomination of Dr Sabine Mauderer as a member of the Deutsche Bundesbank's Executive Board took place on Tuesday.

The President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, visited the Czech National Bank yesterday. The main topics of his informal meeting with CNB Governor Jiří Rusnok and other members of the Board were the view of the Czech economy from outside and the situation of the German economy. The future of the euro area and the banking union were also discussed.

In the first half of 2018, the Bundesbank recorded approximately 31,100 counterfeit euro banknotes with a nominal value of €1.8 million. The number of counterfeits fell by 6.2 % compared with the second half of 2017. Statistically, this equates to around seven counterfeit banknotes for every 10,000 inhabitants per year

The banks repeatedly eased their credit standards and terms and conditions in all three surveyed loan categories. They again adapted credit terms and conditions mainly by narrowing margins irrespective of borrowers’ creditworthiness, albeit to a smaller extent than in the preceding quarter. Demand for loans to enterprises and loans to households for house purchase picked up considerably, with demand for consumer credit and other lending in fact rising sharply.

The financial assets of households in Germany stood at €5,875 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2018. Compared with the fourth quarter of 2017, this represents just a moderate increase of €14 billion, or 0.2%. In the first quarter, claims on insurance corporations grew in particular (€22 billion), followed by currency and deposits, which saw inflows totalling just under €15 billion.

Germany's economic boom will continue. The already high level of capacity utilisation in the economy will increase up until 2020, although growth is unlikely to be quite as strong as in 2017. Growth in exports and business investment will be less strong.

The consolidation process in the German banking sector continued in 2017. Over the course of the year, the overall number of credit institutions fell by 65 to 1,823. This corresponds to a 3.4% decline compared with a drop of 3.7% in 2016.

Germany’s outward foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks grew at a significantly slower rate in 2016 than they did one year earlier on account of smaller positive exchange rate effects as well as a lower volume of new equity investments. Inward FDI in Germany expanded at just a subdued pace, much as it had done in the previous years.

In the first quarter of 2018, German credit institutions eased their credit standards in all three loan categories. This is revealed by the latest Bank Lending Survey (BLS) conducted among banks domiciled in Germany.

At the end of 2017, German households’ financial assets amounted to €5,857 billion, up by €78 billion, or 1.4%, on the third quarter of the year.

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The Bundesbank posted a profit of €2.0 billion for the 2017 financial year, compared with €1.0 billion one year earlier. Following an allocation to the reserves, the remaining distributable profit of €1.9 billion (previous year: €0.4 billion) was transferred in full today to the Federal Government pursuant to section 27 number 2 of the Bundesbank Act (Bundesbankgesetz).

In 2017, the Bundesbank registered approximately 73,000 counterfeit euro banknotes with a nominal value of €4.1 million, which represents an 11% decrease year on year. Statistically, this equates to nine counterfeit banknotes per 10,000 inhabitants.