Although you have correctly understood the behavior of Propagation.REQUIRES_NEW, you have stumbled upon a common misconception about Spring 's Transactional behavior.
In order for the transactional semantics to be applied (that is for the annotation of the method to have any effect), the method needs to be called from outside the class. Calling a method annotated with transactional from inside the class has absolutely no effect on the transactional processing (because the Spring generated proxy class that contains the transactional code does not come into play).
In your example innerMethod2 maybe annotated with @Transactional but since it is called from outterMethod, the annotation is not being processed.
Check out this part of the Spring documentation