Why does bank credit not drive money in Germany (any more)?

Since the turn of the millennium a gap between credit growth and GDP growth has emerged in Germany. The gap widens with surpluses of the German trade balance to other euro area countries and becomes negative, when surpluses of the trade balance contract. This phenomenon is accompanied by a new pattern of money growth, which is not driven by domestic credit of banks any more but by their net foreign assets. German nonfinancial corporations have rising equity ratios and provide other sectors with funds on a net basis. Moreover, their deposits with German banks have grown at a much stronger pace than their loans. We suspect that German membership in the European monetary union is an important explanation of the changing behavior in the real and financial sector and show the substitution between export cash-flows and domestic credit theoretically in a two-country model of post-Keynesian type, in which the two countries use a common currency.