Little more than a decade ago, Deutsche Bank seemed to have achieved the remarkable feat of beating the big Wall Street banks at their own game. Germany’s biggest financial institution, fuelled by an acquisition spree, a long bull market and willingness to pay fat bonuses, owned one of the world’s top five investment banks.

Its rise looked natural and inevitable. Why wouldn’t the biggest bank in the eurozone’s biggest economy be able to compete with JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and outmuscle Barclays, the UK’s would-be investment banking champion? In the summer of 2007, just before the arrival of the global financial crisis, Deutsche’s share price reached €110.

The bank is now a national embarrassment. With shares below €7, Deutsche is worth just €15bn (£13.5bn), about a quarter of the supposed value of its assets. Even in eurozone banking terms, it’s become an also-ran: Santander in Spain is worth €68bn. The plan to chop 18,000 jobs is the only option that remains to ensure a 149-year-old institution survives its misadventures in high-risk investment banking. Every other self-help strategy has failed.

Paul Achleitner, the chairman of supervisory board, called the plan “the right response to the major changes and challenges in the financial industry”, as if Deutsche had been caught up in a new and sudden storm that is battering everyone. He’s clutching at straws. It is correct that nobody is making decent money in trading equities, the part of Deutsche’s operation where the axe will fall most heavily, but the reality is that the storm happened a decade ago. The German bank was simply too slow to react to the global financial crisis.

Deutsche is only now setting up an internal “bad bank” to sell €74bn of unwanted financial assets. Royal Bank of Scotland performed the “bad bank” manoeuvre – on a bigger scale – after the crash and completed the bulk of the process in 2017. Deutsche, unlike RBS, avoided a state-backed bailout, but seems to have wasted an entire decade avoiding serious restructuring.

Its chief executive, Christian Sewing, was nearer the mark when he said Deutsche now had to “say where we are strong and where we are not”. Full-scale investment banking is clearly in the “not” category. Deutsche was present in most of the big banking scandals that came to light after 2008 – such as rigging the foreign exchange and fixed-income markets – and paid a $7.2bn fine in the US for flogging mortgage-backed junk. It even added a few unique offences, such as failure to prevent dirty Russian money being sent to offshore accounts via London.

Sewing’s lower-risk formula for Deutsche’s future sounds more sensible. The bank will concentrate on German retail and business markets while trying to grow in fund management; and the investment banking unit will be a slimmer operation that looks after big eurozone companies’ currency and bond needs.

The open question, though, is whether Deutsche has seen the light too late. “What Deutsche Bank plans to do in the next two to three years is no more than what US and European banks have been doing in cascades ever since the end of the global financial crisis more than 10 years ago,” said the rating agency Scope.

Quite: at a moment when the big banking beasts, even RBS and Barclays in the UK, have declared their years of restructuring to be over, Deutsche is only now talking the language of radicalism. Job cuts are the easy part. The lesson from elsewhere is that it takes about a decade to repair a bank as broken as Deutsche.