Courtesy of Pam Martens
Deutsche Bank Stock Price 2001 through May 30, 2019
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Thanks to former FBI Director James Comey, there are now acceptable times when the 19th century word “Lordy” can be demonstrably exclaimed in public settings. For example, it can be used with pretty much anything to do with the President of the United States or, as we are now suggesting, when referring to the management of Trump’s serially-charged banking establishment, Deutsche Bank.
After setting an historic intraday low of $6.82 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Deutsche Bank mustered a tiny rally in the last half hour of trading today to eke out a close of $6.91. Just 12 years ago, this was a $120 stock. The bank now has a market capitalization of $14.18 billion supporting assets of $1.6 trillion. (Perhaps “supporting” is not the right word. Lordy!)
According to the bank’s 2018 annual report, it also has a derivatives book of $49 trillion notional (face amount). Deutsche Bank’s derivatives book was of such a concern to the International Monetary Fund that it issued a 2016 report which found that Deutsche Bank was heavily interconnected to JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America as well as other mega banks in Europe. The IMF wrote that Deutsche Bank posed a greater threat to global financial stability than any other bank as a result of these interconnections – and that was at a time when its market capitalization was tens of billions of dollars larger than it is today.
Worse still, the headlines the bank has generated in recent years suggest a crime syndicate at work. Last November, its Frankfurt, Germany offices were raided by 170 members of law enforcement in what is believed to be a money laundering probe. In 2017, the bank was fined a total of $630 million by U.S. and U.K. regulators over claims it had laundered billions of dollars out of Russia. That same year the bank settled with the Justice Department and other Federal regulators for $7.2 billion for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to investors. In 2015 Deutsche Bank paid a total of $2.519 billion to the U.S. Justice Department and other regulators for its role in rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor.
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