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.