Deutsche BundesBank

Deutsche Bundesbank

The central bank of Germany -  Deutsche Bundesbank is located in Frankfurt. Like most central banks around the world, the Deutsche Bundesbank is responsible for supervision over the nation's banking system and monetary measures, along with numerous other responsibilities. Eurosystem monetary policy is the Bundesbank's core business area. Central bank of Germany have a wide range of responsibilities, from overseeing monetary policy to implementing specific goals such as currency stability, low inflation and full employment. Central bank also generally issue currency, function as the bank of the government, regulate the credit system, oversee commercial banks, manage exchange reserves and act as a lender of last resort.
The Deutsche Bundesbank was established as the central bank of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957.

The Bundesbank's Central Office is located in Frankfurt am Main. Bundesbank President is Jens Weidmann. Some 10,000 people are employed at the Bundesbank's Central Office in Frankfurt am Main.

The Bundesbank has nine Regional Offices located in differing regions of Germany, such as Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, Mainz, Munich and Stuttgart. They in turn have 35 branches. Each Regional Office is headed by a President, who is answerable to the Bundesbank's Executive Board. The Executive Board of the Bundesbank currently comprises six members. Half are nominated by the Federal Government and half by the Bundesrat, with all members being appointed by the President of the Federal Republic. The Bundesbank is independent of instructions from the Federal Government. In this respect, its status is comparable to that of the Federal Constitutional Court. The overriding aim behind all of the Bundesbank's activities is to safeguard the stability of the general price level and the financial system. The Bundesbank's stability policy also relies on the support of economic, fiscal and wage policies.

Germany holds the second largest reserve of gold in the world after the United States, with these holdings accounting for two-thirds of Germany’s foreign reserves.

The social market economy is regulated not exclusively by the federal government but by a plurality of agencies. For example, there are numerous insurance institutions that deliver social benefits. The most important institution in post-World War IIGermany is the Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bundesbank (German Federal Bank). Upon the establishment of the Bundesbank, its preeminent characteristic was its independence from government control, instituted to prevent a recurrence of the severe inflation experienced in 1922–23, when the government resorted to the printing press for finance.Afterthat the West German government decided that it should never again have a license to print money and that the central bank should be independent of political control. The federal bank maintained a policy of careful control of credit and concern for the international exchange rate of the deutsche mark, which had made West Germany the leading financial power in post-World War II Europe.

Before the circulation of the euro, the common currency of the EU, in 2002, the Bundesbank issued the deutsche mark(the country’s former currency) and oversaw its circulation. 1 July 1990 is a date that has gone down in history. A new political era began for the people of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), they were impatient to get their first Deutsche Mark banknotes. The Bundesbank was charged with supplying the GDR with Deutsche Mark.

The Bundesbank was in charge of the German deutsche mark but now that the country has adopted the euro, it is part of the European system of central banking. Consequently, Germany’s adoption of the euro, the EU’s single currency, in 1999 raised some concerns in the country that the European Central Bank would be subject to political influence and manipulation. Since 1999, it has been part of the Eurosystem, sharing responsibility with the other national central banks and the European Central Bank for the single currency, the euro.

   So, the Deutsche Bundesbank is considered to be the most important and stable central bank in the European Union, due to Germany's reputation of diligent fiscal and monetary measures. As the EU’s most powerful national central bank, the Bundesbank played an important role in the planning of and preparation for the euro. One of its primary roles now is to implement the monetary policies of the European System of Central Banks to help maintain the euro’s stability.
The Bundesbank's participation in the Eurosystem, the integration of the international financial markets and innovations in the fields of payments and finance are creating new challenges for its stability policy.

Bundesbank has its own library. The library’s stock of literature may be consulted by Bundesbank employees and external visitors. Online catalogues can be used for research purposes. The collection comprises books, specialist periodicals, electronic publications, magazine articles and papers from anthologies. The current collection is made up of 240,000 media items and 3,000 periodicals. Books may only be loaned to Bundesbank employees.

The range of topics in the specialist library includes money, lending, currency (theory, policy and history), banking and trading, economic theory and policy, public finance, foreign trade (theory and policy), international agreements, organisations and people in the monetary and economic sectors as well as national and international statistics.

There is a historical archive in Bundesbank, and it is the central archive for the entire central bank system. Its task is to safeguard, evaluate and network all documents from the former Bank and the Deutsche Bundesbank (Central Office, Regional Offices and branches) to make them available for use.

In the central archive, official correspondence, unpublished works, collections and audio-visual material occupy some 6,500 running metres of shelf space. This material goes back to the founding of the West German central bank system in 1948; documents on the former Reichsbank have been transferred to the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive) in Berlin.

Also, there is the Money Museum of the Deutsche Bundesbank. A coin and banknote collection at the Central Office of the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main will be celebrating its centenary in 2016. With a total of more than 350,000 items, the Deutsche Bundesbank’s collection is one of the four largest in Germany alongside those in Berlin, Munich and Dresden.  Even by international standards, the coins and banknotes assembled in the collection are of exceptional importance in terms of their geographical scope and historical range.The present-day collection dates back to the period of the Reichsbank. Almost all of this collection was lost amid the chaos and destruction of 1945, the final year of the Second World War. After the war ended, the Bank deutscher Länder came into possession of no more than a fraction of the former Reichsbank collection, which had 180,000 coins. The remaining pieces formed the basis of the current collection of more than 90,000 coins. The paper money collection, which reportedly consisted of 140,000 banknotes, was lost entirely and had to be built up from scratch. With around 260,000 items, it is now regarded as one of the most important of its kind worldwide.

The Numismatic Library, which is linked to the collection was also set up entirely from scratch at the war and currently contains some 23,000 media items.

The Deutsche Bundesbank hosting the conference entitled "Shaping the future of the Eurosystem", which offers young professionals from European central banks, supervisory authorities and post-graduate students a unique opportunity to discuss important aspects of the future of the Eurosystem with leaders and senior executives from the worlds of central banking and industry. Once a year, Deutsche Bundesbank organises in cooperation with a university a four-day training course on a current topic. It aims at bringing together international Central Bank knowledge with academic research and thinking.