The current good earnings situation is enabling institutions to further strengthen their capital base and thus their resilience to adverse developments,said Claudia Buch, Vice-President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, at the presentation of the 2023 Financial Stability Review. Even in adverse scenarios, financial institutions should have sufficient levels of capital and liquidity to be able to absorb shocks on their own. Resilience, noted Vice-President Buch, would also require investment in IT infrastructure in order to be equipped to deal with cyber risks.

The German economy is set to recover only arduously from the period of weakness that has persisted since the outbreak of Russia’s war against Ukraine, write the Bundesbank’s experts in the Monthly Report. The industrial sector is still up against difficult conditions, and households’ mood for spending remained subdued in the third quarter. The experts do not expect economic output to see slight growth again until the first quarter of 2024.

In a speech at the European Banking Congress, Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel warned against any premature easing of the tight monetary policy currently in place in the euro area. “According to Bundesbank model estimates, the tightening can be expected to have its maximum impact on economic activity in 2023 already, and on inflation only in 2024,” he said at the event in Frankfurt am Main. In other words, much of the inflation-dampening effect induced by monetary tightening is yet to materialise.