German savers invested, mainly via their banks, a lot of money abroad – in those countries where households and companies had bigger debts, for example Spain. And the crisis came and the money flowed back – € billion came back from Spain alone and a large part of that originated in German savings. The ECB made liquidity available to banks in exchange for collateral.
This reflected mainly a strong increase in annual energy and unprocessed food price inflation, with no signs yet of a convincing upward trend in underlying inflation. Headline inflation is likely to remain at levels close to 2% in the coming months, largely reflecting movements in the annual rate of change of energy prices.