Germany’s central bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, began publishing on February 24 a newsletter aiming to present economic research “in a brief and concise manner”. The first ‘Research brief’ article summarised a study of payment methods based on diaries kept by 18,500 customers in seven developed economies. The article was written by Tobias Schmidt, one of the authors of the original study.

German consumers have a much higher preference than people in other countries for using cash in larger