Go to fashionable bars in any major German city and you're likely to hear more heated talk about the stock market than about politics or sport. "It's got to the stage where it's become like the football results," says Christian Bacherl, a project manager in equity capital markets at HypoVereinsbank in Munich.
For the first time, queues of German retail investors seeking shares have formed in banks. And though reports that the whole country has caught the fever for US-style equity culture are perhaps exaggerated, there is solid evidence that the average German investor has overcome a prejudice against stock market investment. Ever since the first landmark Deutsche Telekom flotation four years ago, interest in stock ownership as a reasonable alternative to savings books and bonds has been mounting. Staid German investors once put equities in the same category as casino gambling - today 8% of Germans directly own shares and this percentage is growing. That has fuelled the new-issue market, which has pushed through flotations at an unprecedented rate.
There is such a huge pent-up demand for capital and a backlog of German companies wanting to come to market that investment bankers do not have enough staff to handle the deal flow.