Starting on Tuesday, the Deutsche Bundesbank will be issuing the new €50 banknotes. Following on from the €5, €10 and €20 notes, the €50 note is now the fourth denomination of the new "Europa" series to be brought into circulation in Germany.

General government debt in Germany as defined in the Maastricht Treaty fell by €18 billion in 2016 and amounted to roughly €2.140 trillion at the end of the year, €65 billion down on its peak in 2012.

The Deutsche Bundesbank and Child & Youth Finance International (CYFI) today jointly launched this year’s Global Money Week (GMW) under the motto "Learn.Save.Earn."

The Bundesbank successfully continued its transfers of gold last year. In 2016, more than 216 tonnes of gold were transferred to Frankfurt am Main from storage locations abroad: 111 tonnes from New York and 105 tonnes from Paris.

With the close of the business day on 6 February 2017, the German market with its central securities depository, Clearstream Banking AG, migrated successfully, as scheduled, to TARGET2-Securities (T2S), the Eurosystem’s single shared platform for securities settlement.

In 2016, the Deutsche Bundesbank registered approximately 82,200 counterfeit euro banknotes with a nominal value of €4.2 million, which represents a 14 % decrease year on year. Statistically, this equates to ten counterfeit banknotes per 10,000 inhabitants.

On the whole, German banks made only minor adjustments to their credit standards in the fourth quarter of 2016, as is revealed by the latest Bank Lending Survey (BLS) conducted among banks domiciled in Germany.

This year, the Deutsche Bundesbank will be celebrating its 60th anniversary. The legislation which brought it into being, the Bundesbank Act (Gesetz über die Deutsche Bundesbank), was signed into law on 26 July 1957 by the Federal President.