The german financial system : 9783656606475 : 3656606471 : 03 Mar 2014 : Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Massachusetts Boston, language: English, abstract: As widely recognized, financial systems play an important role for economic growth. The German as well as the American economy seemed to be both very successful over the last decade in terms of GDP growth. Although both economies are successful, their financial systems differ widely. While the American system is strongly capital market-based, banks play the dominant role in the German financial system. As it was for a long time a purely bank-based system, it represented a unique financial system around the world. In this paper, I will point out the main features of the traditional German financial system. I will mainly focus on the role and structure of the financial sector, financing patterns of firms, and the German corporate governance system. So far, most academic li