To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com.

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com.Fiddler and conductor As a solo performer, Germany has few rivals and many fans, striking all the right notes and rising sublimely above Europe’s discord as the DAX posts all-time highs, data show a growing economy, and unemployment dips to the lowest rate since unification. But the continent’s star performer has been struggling with s

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. One of Europe’s biggest media companies, ProSiebenSat.1 Group’s core business is television broadcasting, free to view and financed by advertising. Today, the company reaches 42m households in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, via its 15 channels. The group’s operations have not always been so concentrated. Until 2010–11 the group had

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. For more than three decades Audi, the majority-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Group, has used the German phrase “Vorsprung durch Technik” – progress through technology – as the strapline for its television adverts. German cars have certainly earned a global reputation for high levels of technical quality and reliability. The same coul

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. Germany is riding the crest of a property wave. According to research from real estate adviser Savills, the country saw investment in commercial property of around €9.9bn in the first quarter of the year – a hefty 40% increase in turnover year on year. A sign of how significant that is, is that in volume terms it snaps at the heels of

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. Overall, Germany’s infrastructure is enviable. Germany scored an overall 6.2 out of 10 on the infrastructure rankings of the World Economic Forum’s 2013–14 Global Competitiveness report. It fared better than the US, which was only rated 5.7 out of 10 for the overall quality of its infrastructure. Today, though, roads and other infrast

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. While the sense of crisis in the European financial system has eased in recent months, the true state of the Continent’s banking system remains a mystery. In most cases there is little information in the public domain about bank balance sheets, with even regulators having little understanding of the risks banks are taking. But as cons

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. For years, Frankfurt has wanted to elbow its way into the lucrative Dim Sum market. At a conference on that theme last year, Bundesbank executive board member Joachim Nagel said: “Frankfurt can be more than a niche player. In the future, I can imagine that German companies would like to have the opportunity to do all trade-related ren

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. How the mighty have fallen. The Pfandbrief market, Germany’s covered bond market, used to bestride the European capital markets. Only a decade ago, and driven by public-sector covered bonds called Oeffentlicher Pfandbriefe, issuance comfortably topped €1trn a year. But then, in 2005, the EU got rid of the guarantees that protected the

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. Like Ratty and Mole in The Wind in the Willows, Germany has always liked messing around on the water. Its modern economic incarnation may be as a large and worthy Central European industrial machine, but its heart once throbbed to the ebb and flow of the Baltic Sea and the open waves. For four centuries from the late Middle Ages, the

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. If the “Ruhr Metropolis” – as tourism officials like to call the EU’s third-largest metropolitan region after London and Paris – is distinctive for anything beyond its history of industrial decline and subsequent reconstruction, it is for sprawl. But Germany’s only megacity, with a population of 12m in the western state of North Rhine

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. That massive uncertainty caused investors to seek relative security in German Bunds, causing yields to plunge to record lows at the same time as yields on peripheral bonds widened. In November 2011, the spread of two-year Italian BTPs over equivalent Bunds was 500bp, tenfold higher than where it stood in more peaceable times. As the s

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. They seek them here, they seek them there. Those growth-hungry investors seek them everywhere. Collectively speaking, Germany’s Mittelstand is hardly the Scarlet Pimpernel, the fictional English baronet who saved revolutionary-era French aristocrats from the guillotine, but there are more than a few adumbrations of Baroness Emma Orczy

To see the digital version of this report, please click here. To purchase printed copies or a PDF of this report, please email gloria.balbastro@thomsonreuters.com. It has the appearance of an arcane and technical documentation issue, but a mooted change in the operations of Germany’s debt office, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland Finanzagentur, could make life much easier for Europe’s big derivatives dealers struggling to cope with the rising costs of regulation. At the heart of the issue is the fa