Politicians go la-la-la-la-la, bankers & neocons go lie-lie-lie-lie-lie, and Bloomberg goes hip-hip-hip-hip-hip hooray….It’s all Brexit’s fault. Obviously.
With every working day, it becomes clearer that somebody – at Agence France Presse, Deutsche Bank or one of its PR consultants – invented and sold to the markets a complete fabrication in relation to Deutsche being “very close to a deal” with the US Justice Department that would “bring the fine down from $14 billion to $5.4 billion”.
The suggestions that there had been negotiations, that they had progressed, and that the near $9 billion reduction was at hand were all utterly without foundation.
But DB’s CEO John Cryan is now in the US and has been talking to Justice. And he’s got precisely nowhere with them, Bild reported over the weekend.
Earlier – before the banking system was saved by a black lie – there had been a White Knight in the background…..probably a US Bank. But the main banks there all said Nope, that’s not true.
During the last six days, Turkey was thought to be interested in acquiring DB, Merkel was alleged to be wanting to merge Commerz and Deutsche as a prelude to sneaking some bailout via the back door – in order to set up the Hindentanic as a tasty morsel for a White Knight, and Wolfgang Schäuble has been (we were told) working on his best friend Mario Draghi to lead an ECB buyout. Good luck with that one.
All of them have been floated (by whom? we wonder) and all of them have been denied by those involved.
Now there’s a rumour doing the rounds that China will be a Yellow (or Red) Knight, and is ‘at the top of the short list of those with pockets deep enough to bail out the highly leveraged Deutsche Bank’. Nobody seems to have asked the folks in Beijing what they think, however. Some good pieces are around making the case (given the PBOC’s cash mountain) for China to buy the absolutely fine nothing to worry about institution. But the politburo remains inscrutable….which it would be, given that its members are all Chinese.
What’s missing from the China story is a single verifiable fact. And now Cryan has had to start stamping out other fires in relation to derivatives. Shareholders are becoming disturbed about the derivatives exposure (Deutsche has $30 trillion worth, more than total global GDP) so Cryan is reassuring everyone that they’re all netted off. Of course they are John, of course they are.
So in this situation, we can rely upon the neocon Establishment to have a plan. Where best to look than Boombust aka Bloomberg….the guys n gals for whom Big is always Good, globalism is the only way forward, and upside down is normal?
And indeed, faced with a bank so big, globally connected and badly run that it now threatens the system itself, Bumbeggar’s answer is to make it even bigger through a merger….with Barclays. Bloomerbug argues that ‘Barclays Plc CEO Jes Staley has preached the need for a European champion in that business to ward off American dominance, and this would provide that: the combined company would pass Staley’s alma mater JPMorgan Chase & Co. as the world’s biggest trading firm. The deal would also give London-based Barclays a firmer foothold in continental Europe,’ Boombust can’t resist adding, because ‘Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has further undermined confidence in the banking sector’. There’s that pesky Brexit again, undermining what was universal confidence in the management of the world’s banking system.
To be fair, this was one suggestion put forward by Bloomberg. There were others, but the bad news is they were even worse ideas….they start with Santander, so I won’t labour the point.
This morning so far, Deutsche is the biggest faller on Germany’s Dax, with the shares heading down by 3%. The BBC (now itself in the clutches of a bank) writes that ‘Investors had hoped chief executive John Cryan could negotiate down a $14bn fine’. No BBC, they didn’t bloody hope anything: they were told that it was going to happen. But it was a lie.
When is there going to be an inquiry into how the lie was put into the media channels, thus causing hundreds of investors to lose millions of dollars propping up, in all good faith, a mendacious bank?
“We have set a date of 34th of February to look into this,” said Tod Lurr at the FBI’s financial fraud division, “once we have cleared Hillary Clinton”.
It’s going to take silver bullets to get Trump out of the race for the White House
The Slog 