In contrast to most other advanced capitalist societies, household indebtedness in Germany has stagnated for most of the 2000s. While several political economy accounts rightly point to the country’s export-led growth regime as an overall explanatory theme for this development, scholars have systematically missed to embed personal indebtedness within the institutional changes and continuities in the German banking sector. This paper follows the trajectories of household debt and retail banking in Germany since the 1970s and reveals the contradictory political and economic processes of ‘muted financialisation’ of private households in the biggest European economy. By analysing the „logic of bank competition“ (Trumbull 2012), the contestation of securitisation as a major financial innovation, and the domestic and European deregulation and liberalisation agenda around personal credit, it contributes to our understanding of the varieties and commonalities of financialised capitalism.
