German sovereign bonds have become scarce on the European repo market over recent years. A new analysis investigates the impact of the Eurosystem’s monetary policy asset purchase programme on the repo market, and shows that central bank securities lending can help to counteract scarcity.

In the low-interest-rate setting, the Eurosystem’s accommodative monetary policy has been relying to a greater extent on non-standard measures and forward guidance on the future path of policy rates. A new paper examines how these measures have worked across the term structure and how market expectations have evolved during the phase of low interest rates. The results illustrate that the Eurosystem can continue to influence market participants’ interest rate expectations at the effective lower bound by way of unconventional monetary policy measures.

German credit institutions are sufficiently capitalised to deal with potential losses from their residential mortgage exposures that could arise if house prices, which have been rising strongly since 2010, were to fall sharply. This is shown by the results of two current stress tests that have been developed by Bundesbank experts for risk analyses.

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Those familiar words are no less true in the world of economic forecasting. A new study considers how far into the future it makes sense to forecast.

How much capital is needed both at the individual bank level and for the system as a whole especially in situations of macroeconomic stress? And is the capital in the system distributed across individual banks in the optimal way to cover potential systemic losses? A new study gives answers to these questions in an integrated supervisory framework.