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German Finance Ministry: Market crisis mainly a US issue

Sep 15, 2008, 10:31 GMT

Berlin - The current crisis in world financial markets is primarily an issue for the United States and has thus far had little effect on the real economy in Germany, an official government spokesman said Monday. Finance Ministry spokesman Torsten Albig said that, while some German financial institutions had been hit by the US subprime crisis, 'German financial institutions in their totality are recognizably not as involved as US and other Anglo-Saxon institutions.' This could be taken as a sign of the relative stability of German financial markets, Albig, the official spokesman for German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck, said. Steinbrueck had made clear repeatedly, 'that we are in the middle of a crisis, it is not over, it is to be taken seriously, but it is centrally an American crisis,' Albig said. 'What we are experiencing is what we have been seeing for some time - a crisis in US financial markets that has thus far had astonishingly little effect ... on the real economy, although it does have an effect,' he said. Albig repeated that the Finance Ministry and the German financial supervisory authority BaFin saw the fall-out from the bankruptcy of US bank Lehman Brothers as 'manageable.' But he declined to put a figure on the liabilities faced by the German banking system, saying only that the German government was keeping a close eye on developments.

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German Finance Ministry: Market crisis mainly a US issue

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