Here you will find general information on the balance of payments as well as the international standards on which the concept and methodology of the German balance of payments are based.

Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel has once again advocated making a timely start on normalising policy rates in the euro area. The risk of acting too late is increasing notably, he said at a conference in Eltville am Rhein. “As inflation in the euro area continues to run high, we need to act,” Mr Nagel urged. “And if both the incoming data and our new projection confirm this view in June, I will advocate a first step [towards] normalising ECB (European Central Bank) interest rates in July.”

Trade repositories (TRs) are a relatively new category of financial market infrastructure. They were explicitly added to the oversight tasks of central banks by the CPSS/IOSCO Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures (PFMIs) finalised in April 2012.

Households’ financial assets grew by €161 billion to €7,618 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021. Taking all transactions and valuation effects into account, growth was thus significantly higher than in the (weak) third quarter.

Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann says that non-standard monetary policy measures can have a variety of effects on income and wealth distribution. “Much like conventional interest rate policy, the non-standard measures are more likely to have reduced income inequality,” he said in a speech in Hamburg.

At the end of December 2021, Germany’s net external assets stood at €2,545 billion, thus amounting to around 71% of nominal gross domestic product (GDP). Both German claims and liabilities vis-à-vis non-residents continued to rise in 2021.

“The impact of Russia’s attack on Ukraine is likely to place a noticeable strain on economic activity in Germany from March,” the Bundesbank writes in its Monthly Report. Energy commodity prices have surged which will probably put a damper on household consumption and the production of energy-intensive industries. Together with the looming disruptions to foreign trade and supply chains and the heightened uncertainty, the consequences of the war are likely to slow the economic recovery originally expected by a significant degree.