Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel welcomed the ECB’s decision to raise its key interest rates by 50 basis points: “I have always been committed to decisively combating high inflation. From my point of view, it is better to make a bolder interest rate move at the start and reduce the risk of having to hit the brakes too hard later on. I am very pleased with the interest rate decision we reached in the ECB Governing Council,” he told Germany’s “Handelsblatt” newspaper. He noted that the era of negative interest rates was over.

The Bundesbank has joined 25 national central banks and supervisory authorities as well as the ECB in signing the ESCB and SSM Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Charter (Diversity Charter). “I am committed to advancing diversity and an open-minded working culture at the Bundesbank. By signing the ESCB & SSM Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Charter, the Bundesbank is doubling down on its promise to embrace the power of being different,” said Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel on the occasion of the publication of the Charter by the ECB at the end of July.

In its Monthly Report, the Bundesbank writes that the German economy is likely to have pretty much stagnated in the second quarter of 2022. Although the elimination of most coronavirus mitigation measures lent a strong boost to service providers, which had previously been constrained, the high inflation was a drag on households’ purchasing power and consumer sentiment deteriorated sharply. The report adds that supply bottlenecks and high uncertainty about future economic developments also weighed on industry.

The Bundesbank’s experts have created a new provisional dataset that can be used to examine wealth and debt developments at the level of individual households in Germany in a timely manner at quarterly intervals. According to this dataset, wealth inequality decreased slightly between 2009 and 2021, but remains high overall. The analysis presented in the current Monthly Report also shows that the rate of return on total assets varies considerably between individual households.