Diary (October 28, 2020)
Online diary of Karl Jones for Wednesday October 28, 2020.
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Diary
Terminate With Extreme Pride and Prejudice
Terminate With Extreme Pride and Prejudice
Tacoverse
The Tacoverse is a transdimensional corporation which functions as a pocket universe constructed entirely from tacos.
Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank
How this plodding, conservative bank from a country famous for diligence and thrift turned into the most infamous casino on Wall Street is the subject of David Enrich's excellent, deeply reported book Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction.
It started by recruiting Edson Mitchell, an American executive from Merrill, who believed Deutsche Bank's "stubborn Germanness was the main impediment to unleashing its full animal spirits." Mitchell set about building a global markets operation, not at the bank's Frankfurt headquarters but in London, where he could function more independently. He hired a staff of "bloodthirsty piranhas" from Wall Street who knew how to push boundaries, as Enrich's tale tells.
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Among them was Bill Broeksmit, a risk management genius who subsequently killed himself as regulators were moving in on the bank and whose death is the mystery Enrich uses to frame the story.
Mitchell died early in a plane crash, but the machinery he built kept chugging along. Enrich tells the story of its rise and fall in the careful style of a good newspaper reporter (he is an editor at The New York Times) but allows the complicated material to unfold like a good novel.
With the piranhas in charge, Deutsche Bank eventually became the biggest bank in the world, with 90,000 employees and some $2 trillion in assets — almost the size of the German economy, Enrich notes. Despite that, it was a clumsily managed place.
But the private banking division, which catered to the rich and famous, arranged the loan anyway — and then, when Trump stopped making payments, arranged another one.
- 'Dark Towers' Chases Scandal-Ridden Deutsche Bank's Mysterious Ties To Donald Trump @ NPR (18 February 2020)