DARK TOWERS

Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction

By David Enrich

Each era seems to have a bank emblematic of its excesses — in the 1980s, it was Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk bond king; in the 2000s, it was Lehman Brothers.

The 2010s were different. No towering financial collapse marred the landscape; no Madoff or Enron blighted the business page. Yet never have good times felt so bad. In these early months of the next decade, America is prosperous but malcontent, solvent but anxious.

David Enrich, a former reporter with The Wall Street Journal and now the finance editor of The New York Times, has found, perhaps, the perfect vehicle for this murky, un-transparent moment. Name a banking scandal and Deutsche Bank was in the thick of it — interest rate manipulation, Russian money laundering, currency dealings with rogue states, the collapse of Italy’s (and the world’s) oldest bank, hidden derivative losses, a high-level suicide.

It would have been perfect had Deutsche bankrolled a shunned real estate mogul and made him king — and of course, they did that too, the one bank that lent to Donald Trump long after he had a reputation for stiffing its peers and for stiffing Deutsche itself.