Grubstakers - Episode 184 Unlocked: Dark Towers - Deutsche Bank feat. David Enrich

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

We were thrilled to interview David Enrich, the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times and the author of 'Dark Towers Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction'. On this episode we discuss the odd deaths plaguing the banking industry, he explains mirror trading and how it relates to money laundering, and he answers our questions on what may happen to Deutsche Bank moving forward. His book is an insightful read on the inner mischief of one of the most shady members of the finance community. Follow him on twitter below. @davidenrich

Thank you. I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about. We have more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, 2... The evil has gone. Hey everyone, welcome to GrubStakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Yogi Paywall and I'm joined by my wonderful financial co-hosts... Steve Jeffries.

Andy Palmer. Sean P. McCarthy. And today we have a special episode where we were able to interview David Enrich, the writer of Dark Towers, Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction. This book chronicalizes Deutsche Bank and their corruption, and it was a very, very fun interview we got to do with David, and we're very grateful that he came and joined us at Grubstakers HQ.

It was very interesting to learn what he thought about the multiple deaths that have occurred at Deutsche Bank, to learning more about the corruption and how mirror trading works, as well as learning his thoughts and predictions of the near future of Deutsche Bank. I was very sad to learn that he was part of the cover-up of the suspicious deaths, and that this New York Times reporter would not go on the record linking the CIA to these deaths, despite my insistent questioning. I tried to get to the truth, people, but what can you do? Yeah, I had to cut about 15 minutes of questions asking why Nellie Bowles didn't run that piece on us, and he was not happy about that.

It was real wild. At one point in the interview, we asked too many questions, and then he started asking us for our personal addresses and times that we can be found at home. Right. Yeah. He said that he wanted all of our social security numbers. And honestly, I'm not sure exactly why he said that,

but we were able to interview him and he gave us some very great insight on Deutsche Bank and we hope you enjoy it. And check out the book. A great resource. And he gave us some very great insight on Deutsche Bank, and we hope you enjoy it. And check out the book. Great resource, and that's helped our multi-part episode on Deutsche Bank quite a bit. So thanks to him. Thanks for his time, and check out the book. And that interview will start right now.

And joining us on the show is David Enrich. He has written The Spider Network, The Wild Story of a Math Genius, A Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History, as well as the more recent Dark Towers, Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and An Epic Trail of Destruction. David Enrich, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So the open question I have for you is that has Deutsche Bank reached out to you at all after you put out the book? Oh, they reach out to me all the time. And I reach out to them. I mean, I have a functioning professional relationship with them. And I think they have been over the past couple of years, very unhappy with some of the reporting I've done,

but they also have, you know, they have a PR and communication staff that is professional and, um, you know, I think does its best sometimes to be helpful. And I certainly have respect for those people. And so they're a very easy point of contact for me. And, you know, when they hear me on a podcast or on TV or something, saying something that pisses them off i very quickly get a phone call from them and and you know they and i try to listen the same way i would listen to a source calling me or a reader or anyone else contacting me um i do try to keep an open mind and you know the bank has done a lot of very bad stuff over the years but that is does not mean it has no capacity at all to do the right thing. Of course. I finished your book recently, and it is a fantastic read. I really appreciate the fact that the concept of mirror trading, as detailed in your book, is the best I've ever seen money

laundering explained. Do you feel that that practice is common in the major banks? Well, I think mirror trading is itself not something that Deutsche Bank invented. I think Deutsche Bank took it a step further and used it more extensively than any other bank that I've ever seen. But certainly money laundering is a very common problem in the modern financial system. And I think banks over the past 10 years or so, in large part, because the U.S. has been so aggressive at trying to clamp down on this, banks have become more serious generally about trying to police their employees and police their clients. But man, it is a total mess out there still. I mean, I talk pretty regularly to a number of employees who work.

So Deutsche Bank, for example, has in their U.S. operations, they've out or not. I mean, I talk pretty regularly to a number of employees who work. So Deutsche Bank, for example, has in their U.S. operations, they've out or not outsourced, but they've got their headquarters in the U.S. is obviously in New York, but they've got down in Jacksonville, Florida, this big kind of anti-money laundering and compliance division, as do a bunch of other major banks. And I mean, I was down in Jacksonville last year and I still talk to a lot of the employees who are down there and the place is just it's really dysfunctional. And I mean, I was down in Jacksonville last year and I still talk to a lot of the employees who are down there and the place is just it's really dysfunctional. And I think Deutsche Bank kind of recognizes that and is trying to deal with it. But they've got this very deeply embedded culture and so do other banks. But we're talking about Deutsche Bank and

they've got this very deeply embedded culture where the employees and their managers are incentivized basically to just speed through transactions and give the green light transactions and clients and instead of being rewarded for uncovering bad stuff and stopping bad stuff they're actually rewarded and encouraged and often compensated based on their basically how quickly they can churn through accounts and transactions. And that obviously provides a very powerful incentive for employees to just cut corners. And I've talked to a lot of employees down there who are actually really take their job seriously and view what they are doing.

It's kind of the front line against terrorism and drug trafficking and things like that. And it's really dispiriting to them. And again, a lot of these people come from other major financial institutions and arrive at Deutsche Bank and are just kind of apoplectic about what they see there, because there is this long running culture of, I just think, disrespect for the rule of law and putting profits, especially in the short term, above absolutely anything else. And in a division that's supposed to prevent money laundering, there's no way that division is ever going to generate revenue or increase profits. It's a cost center. And their job is to say no. bank employees and their managers to stand up to that pressure to, you know, since they're not making any money in the first place, to not eat into the bottom line of the revenue

makers. David, Sean McCarthy here. Obviously, I understand what mere trading is, but could you explain for the sake of our listeners what mere trading is? God, I hate when people do this because it's so complicated. Sorry. Let's say you are a Russian who has a lot of money in rubles and wants to be able to have that money in a financial system that is not Russian. So maybe you want it in the European financial system or the American financial system. Because Russia often has strict capital controls and makes it, and is also monitoring some of these oligarchs' money, it's not as easy as just like, you know, taking, going to, you know, a foreign exchange place and transferring your rubles into dollars or euros.

So basically the system that Deutsche Bank created was that the Russian would, through Deutsche Bank, buy with rubles a bunch of like shares of, I don't know, like a blue chip stock. So maybe they buy a bunch of shares of Barclays, let's say, or IBM or whatever. And so that they're putting rubles in that way. that occurs simultaneously, the Russian has set up, or Deutsche Bank maybe, would set up a shell company in a place, let's say in Cyprus, that has, so Cyprus is part of the Eurozone, their currency is euros. And in that shell company transaction, there would be, the Russian individual would sell the same number of shares of IBM or Barclays or whatever. And so the effect would be that in exchange for selling it, he would get back euros. And so just like that, the rubles that you put into the system in paying for IBM stock come out as euros because you just sold the same number of IBM shares.

And so, first of all, that's like a very simplistic, not entirely precise explanation. And it's much more complicated. And it was happening at scale. So there were tons of these transactions, billions and billions of dollars worth of it. But that's kind of the bottom line. It's called a mirror trade because it's two simultaneous transactions that are mirror images of each other and are the same size except in different currencies. And theoretically, it's the type of thing, if you have a sophisticated transaction monitoring system and sophisticated computer systems that talk to each other, is a type of thing that a major international bank actually, it should be very easy for them to spot and prevent.

And Deutsche Bank, in part because they never invested in technology because it was expensive, and in part because the culture really was not about asking unpleasant questions, this was able to go on for a long while, even after some of the banks where this was happening. And there was a bank in Cyprus that was involved in one end of this, and they started asking questions. They were pleading for information from Deutsche Bank, and Deutsche Bank just kept brushing it under the rug, basically ignoring the queries. And this allowed it to go on for years longer than it otherwise would have.

I don't know about your familiarity with the BCCI scandal, but do you think it's fair to say that Deutsche Bank could be the next BCCI? I mean, I don't know. I think every era has its own kind of bad boy of banking and BCCI and Deutsche Bank share that distinction in their respective eras. I mean, I think the question with Deutsche Bank, a difference is that they have, I mean, they remain technically solvent. They have the support of the German government that is, I think, all but guaranteed. And I think they, I honestly do think that they are trying a very long period from the late 90s until really around 2015 or so, I'd say, where the place was just completely lawless. And it was being run. I mean, you could make an argument it was being run essentially as a criminal enterprise.

And it is there's certainly a lot of criminality going on inside of it. And I don't know, I definitely, I assume there is still criminal activity that courses through Deutsche Bank's veins. And I'm sure that some of their employees, given that there are tens of thousands of them, are continuing to be involved in misconduct. I don't think, though, that at this point in Deutsche Bank's history, criminality is a defining trait. I think it has been historically. And I guess that's one way I would distinguish it from BCCI, which is to me, again, hindsight being 2020, it's much more, I think Deutsche Bank actually does serve a, or at least should be serving a productive, important role in the global financial system certainly in the european financial system and so i think it's i don't i think it's important not to paint it with too

broad a brush certainly do you think deutsche bank's restructuring plan that they announced will actually work i guess in a narrow business sense and then also in a broader cultural sense like so they're going to get rid of their sales and trading division effectively and replace it with a more sort of capital markets division they announced these goals to get back to a more normal leverage ratio of 4.5 percent and they're the last i checked here about like 4.1 percent and for the listeners for comparison's sake, Bank of America in the industry are at more around like 8.3 percent right now. I don't I think the biggest and first of all, I don't know is the short answer. And no one knows. It's all it's a question of guesswork.

And my frankly, my track record of predicting the future in business and finance issues is very, very bad. So with that caveat, like to me, the big problem that Deutsche Bank faces is if you look at its core businesses and what it's identified as its core businesses, I don't know how on earth they make money. And there is, and the businesses that have been profitable for them over the years, there are really two of them. One has been the sales and trading business, which is, risky, and it has been run in a way that,

first of all, it was built on borrowed money. And so if you're trying to improve your leverage ratio, the way to do that is obviously to reduce your reliance on borrowed money, and it's very hard to do that when you have a sales and trading business that's become much more capital intensive because of all the new post-financial crisis rules. But more important, if you look at their core businesses, the two things that have been profitable are one is the sales and trading business and the other is their transaction processing business, which serves as kind of the financial. And that is a really core business that helps companies all over the world and other institutions all over the world move money around, kind of meet payroll needs, do currency conversions,

things like that. And that Deutsche Bank is one of the leaders in that field. And they were on that bandwagon before most other banks. The problem is that that's a fairly that that's becoming an increasingly, not commoditized business, but an increasingly crowded field. And so the margins are going to go down. And since they're really paring back in sales and trading, assuming they stick with that, it really leaves this, and they've got a struggling wealth management business, and then they have this vast, enormously wasteful, enormously inefficient German retail and commercial banking business that is, and Germany is a bad place to be doing those services because Germans, you know, not to play into stereotypes, but are notoriously frugal.

And more important, it's just Germany is clogged with so many banks that the margins for a company are, it's a very low margin business. And frankly, you know, when you can flip the perspective 180 degrees and maybe that's a good thing, right? I mean, from a consumer standpoint, it probably is a good thing. For a safety and soundness standpoint in Germany, it's probably a good thing. Oh, shoot. I'm sorry. No worries, man. Yeah. I mean, look, I think to me, one of the great, one of the tricky things about evaluating the health and success of a bank these days is that there are just very different perspectives on what constitutes success and strength. And I think from an investor standpoint and from a financial analyst standpoint, they obviously want higher margins, higher profits. If you flip it, though, from a regulatory standpoint, and frankly, the regulators do too, because they want the profits to help build capital.

And from a customer standpoint, and frankly, from a social standpoint, there is no particular reason that banks should be making billions of dollars in profits. I mean, that's money that is being directly extracted from the real economy and from the real financial system. And a bank at its core is supposed to efficiently allocate capital between people who have an excess of capital or surplus of capital and those who need capital and need to borrow money. And the more money that the bank extracts in profits is money that's really just being siphoned directly out of the economy. And so you can argue that banks like in Germany, where it's a very low margin business and there you have a lot of trouble, it's just not lucrative. You know, the return on equity is low. And that is very frustrating for a bank. And that's part of the

reason that Deutsche Bank went on this, you know, two or three decade global misadventure because they wanted to escape those low return German businesses. And it ended very badly for them. And it meant that they now have this choice between returning to that very low profit business, which is going to be very unsatisfying for a lot of its shareholders, or they need to find new ways to make more money. And that involves generally taking great risks. And shareholders and regulators, given Deutsche Bank's track record, have really kind of lost their appetite for that.

So, I mean, I think Deutsche Bank is stuck in a very unpleasant place. And I don't know how they get out of it, to be honest with you. Andy, do you have a question you want to ask? Yeah, I think it's mostly been answered. But I guess, you know, we keep talking about't you think at least in what we've been talking about so far and amongst ourselves as uh this sort of ticking time bomb um and so uh i guess i'm hesitant to ask because you said you don't like making predictions but i was wondering still like what you think i didn't like making predictions i said i'm not

okay well as long as you're having you're on the right podcast um do you have uh well from at least your perspective and all your research uh would you say is maybe your uh would be like the worst case scenario and then maybe the best case scenario and then where would you kind of lean on what looks more likely i mean from whose perspective like how do you define worst case like what like the like the thing that causes them to collapse and need to be rescued or do you mean that like another scandal erupts or what i would probably say from the perspective of the i have i have a good scenario in my head which i think is not i don't think it's the most likely outcome but i do think

it's possible which is that deutsche bank has another huge scandal and maybe that's that they turn out to be i mean i don't even know like they're doing there's some vast money laundering scheme that they are like keeping like some very bad person in power in some part of the world. Or maybe it is that their top executives have been stealing money. And I'm just making stuff up, to be clear. There's some very bad scandal that happens in the U.S. or at least is happening in dollars, which means that the money is at one point going through the U.S. and the U.S. law enforcement will take a very dim view of that activity. And look, I mean, the Fed, which is Deutsche Bank's primary regulator in the United States at this point, has their patience has worn quite thin with Deutsche Bank over the years.

And they've been extremely patient with the bank, but it seems to be really wearing thin. And it's not outside the realm of possibility that if Deutsche Bank steps in or causes another big scandal, that the Fed, the political pressure on the Fed to really take drastic action will become unbearable. And they will do, they will kind of, you know, go the nuclear route, which is to revoke Deutsche Bank's license to operate in the United States. And I don't, I'm not predicting that will happen, but I think that that is, that's not outside the realm of possibility. I mean, there's, I've talked to Deutsche Bank executives over the past couple of years who have acknowledged that that is one of the things that really keeps them awake at night.

And it is definitely not outside the realm of possibility that Deutsche Bank, not even by design, but just because they are still a very broken bank, ends up, you know, winding up in some sort of big scandal. And I think, and this to me is where the Donald Trump stuff really fits in, interestingly, because Deutsche Bank has become fairly or unfairly just synonymous with Trump in the United States. And obviously, you know, if Trump were to lose the election and Democrats are in power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there is going to be a lot of political pressure, I think, to punish Deutsche Bank. And so let's say they step into another scandal and with President Biden.

And I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that there could be a lot of pressure to kick them out of the U.S. And if that happens, that instantly cripples their ability to do business almost anywhere in the world, because they will no longer be able to clear dollar-denominated transactions. They'll basically no longer be an international bank. And not only will that cripple them, but it'll have immediately very serious collateral damage for the rest of the financial system, because Deutsche Bank, because of all the transactions and particular derivatives that it's done over the years, is sitting on an enormous amount of stuff that has to be routed through the U.S. one way or the other. And again, I'm kind of straying into, we're getting

increasingly far-fetched in what I'm saying, but there would be very significant ripple effects from that, which I think is probably part of the reason it's not likely to happen. But that certainly is something that over the years has kept Deutsche Bank executives, well, it hasn't kept them up at night and i think it's given them some nightmares though sure um speaking of scandals i just wanted to ask would you say in your research um would you say that deutsche bank has had more less or equal uh suspicious deaths to your typical wall street bank um well i don't know i mean they're i'm not sure I'd call the death suspicious. Uh, there have been clearly Deutsche Bank over the years has been a pretty unpleasant place to work.

And, um, there have been a number of employees, as you guys know, who have, uh, uh, chosen to end their own lives. And I don't think there have been, this is a problem that is actually broader than Deutsche Bank, as I'm sure you guys know, but there, this has happened at a bunch of banks and the reality is there've only been, unless I'm miscounting, there've only been two among current Deutsche Bank employees that I'm aware of.

There've been at least one or two others with people who had been Deutsche Bank executives and had left. It's a really troubling pattern, though. And I mean, obviously, as you guys know, in my book, I spent a lot of time, well, frankly, I spent a lot of my life tracing the Bill Brokesmith case and looking as part of that at some of the other cases as well. I mean, Tom Bowers, who died of suicide last November, is a guy who I've gotten to know from my book, from the reporting, and he's a character in the book. And so it's upsetting and it's stunning. I don't, like, there's a lot of conspiracy theories online about why people like Bowers died. And I don't know, that's a dangerous road to go down because there is, and it's like, I'm just not sure how constructive it is but i mean i guess when you talk to sources who are close to some of these people who committed suicide have they been

satisfied with the investigations for the most part well that yeah that's a good question i mean look in the brooksman case and one of the things the revelations that uh bill brooksman's son val brooksman found going through his dad's email and then going through his mom's email as well, is that Deutsche Bank appeared, they conducted a very, what they said was a very detailed kind of investigation into the circumstances surrounding Broeksmit's death. And Val found and showed me their family's lawyers really were not satisfied by that investigation. To them, it looked a lot like a whitewash that the bank had really been downplaying

some of the things that had been stressing out Groksmith in the months before his death and had been, frankly, downplaying the extent of his exposure or potential exposure to certain government investigations. And now, that is not to say that there was anything other than suicide involved in Bill Brooksman's death, but it's just simply, the bank's public stantum is that his death had nothing to do with his work at the bank, and that's just flatly false.

And there was a lot of lying, frankly, that was his work at the bank. And that's just flatly false. And there was a lot of lying, frankly, that was going on at the bank in their public statements around that. And which, you know, there's so look, I mean, the most suspicious of all these deaths doesn't involve Deutsche Bank directly. It involves this Italian bank, Monte De Paschi, where that actually had been done in by some derivatives transactions that had done with Deutsche Bank. But in that case, you've got, first of all, people going to jail. And second of all, one of the people who was a senior executive at that bank and supposedly committed suicide by jumping out of a window. But there's been the CCTV of that has shown quite clearly that he,

I shouldn't say it's shown quite clearly. It appears to show that he fell out of the window backwards as if he'd been pushed. And it also shows him lying, dying in a courtyard and two people come up to, and it looks like from the video that they're checking to make sure he's dead. So I mean,

that is a suspicious death and Brooksman's death is a tragedy and complicated and obviously he was really wrestling with like some demons that you know are almost impossible for us sitting here to i think fully understand but he did do it to himself there's not any there's no one i have heard credibly state that that was anything other than a suicide. And it's the same for the lawyer who died a couple months later at Deutsche Bank, who also hung himself. And it's the same with Bowers, who, again,

not to say it's not related to the bank at all, but there's no indication I've heard that there were suspicions about the manner of his death and whether it was murder or something like that. We've only got a few more questions here. I really appreciate your time and joining us here, David. The first question I had is that did you look at the death of Sue and Hewitt in 2013 or the Alfred Herrhausen car bombing from 1989? The Herrhausen, yes. What was the first one, though? Susan Hewitt.

She was like a former Deutsche Bank executive. She died in 2013. Her body was found in the river. I believe it was in the UK. And they said that like what it was was she went to check like a bent pipe and she fell in the UK. And they said that like, what it was, was she went to check like a bent pipe. And she fell in the river. The other one I found recently was Man Mohan Mal. This happened literally like a month ago. It was a murder suicide with his wife who had been pregnant with, you know, what would have been his future child. But he was also formerly working at Deutsche Bank.

It is not often I've spent years digging into into this bank and I feel like I know it better than anyone. It is not often that I am surprised by something and I'm surprised. Those are, I, Herrhausen, yes, Herrhausen definitely, that is, he was assassinated. And I think there's still to this day debate over exactly who did it and why. And a group called the Red Army Faction, I believe, is the one that's taking credit for it. And they wanted to decapitate Deutsche Bank at the end of the Cold War. And in fact, ended up making the problem much worse because Herrhausen at least was a guy who he was a strong leader and someone who actually

had a vision and once he was assassinated all hell started to break loose at deutsche bank but the these other two um to be frank i had not heard of them and it uh so i don't know um yeah yeah no i it um it is crazy how when you look into Deutsche Bank deaths, the amount of things that suddenly pop up. When reading your book, I had an odd connection with the Anshu Jain. We both happen to be from the same state in India, from Rajasthan. And when I was reading about how the fact that he didn't speak German was such an affront to the German bankers and stuff. But I also came across a video of ann herhausen alfred's daughter and she also now works at deutsche bank and there's videos of her uh speaking in german and

part of me was like so frustrated because like i know where you know on shoe may have grown up in jaipur and the fact that he went from speaking hindi to then speaking english the fact that this german banks like you know he doesn't speak German, so this guy sucks. It was so interesting to me. But the question I have about it is that like, you know, although racism in a bank that's committed this much fraud

seems to be a minor point, but do you think that that is indicative of major banking as a whole in that if you're not a part of the club based off your race or the language you speak, you're not able to

go up the ranks yeah absolutely and racism is alive and well in the banking industry it's frankly alive and well in much of the corporate world and i think that in banking that ranges from you know just rank and file employees who are anything other than white facing long odds at getting hired, getting promoted, getting good career opportunities. It affects customers of the bank, especially at a retail level where black and brown customers are routinely disadvantaged, whether it's in terms of being able to borrow money at competitive rates or even in some cases being able to open bank accounts. That's a widespread problem.

And it goes all the way up the food chain and to the fact that it is not an accident that in the Fortune 500, there are, what, three, maybe four black men or black people, period, who are CEOs. I don't know how many people of color there are, but it's not many. And what Anshu Jain is, look, Anshu Jain is a flawed man and a flawed leader who did not run

the bank well, but he was definitely, I can say with 100% confidence, a victim of just very vigorous, explicit racism. And it ranged from people literally making fun of his accent and his nationality and his skin color to much more and kind of harder to quantify and more kind of the gaslighting variety, but that he was really did not get the respect that he deserved. And some of this I think is like the fault of Germany, but some of this is just the fault of elite power structures that racism exists and it is potent. And anyone who thinks that that kind of fades away when you climb to the top of a big, powerful institution and have tens of millions of dollars, they're kidding themselves and frankly you can look at i mean there's another really good example of this um i think vikram pandit who is the ceo of city group for a few years during the financial crisis was someone who again was a fail like he was flawed as a leader

he made a bunch of mistakes but he also i mean i was covering city group at the time and got to know these people very well and there's absolutely no no question that he was a victim of racism, and that made it much harder to do his job, and it made his odds of being a failure much higher. So there is absolutely no question in my mind that played a big role in Anshu's demise, I guess. Yeah. I looked at his cousin Ajit Jain, who works at Berkshire Hathaway, and I was looking at

the relationship between Deutsche Bank and Berkshire, but then I found a quote from Warren Buffett that was oddly comforting, where he was like, oh, if you need to replace me, choose Ajit. He's way better than me. And to read about the bigotry from your book, and then to see that, I was like, well, I mean, at least Warren Buffett can admit that this guy is better than him and he shouldn't be judged by his skin color. I only have two more questions. I really appreciate your time, David. The next one I have is, so obviously the conspiracies surrounding Deutsche Bank are plenty from people believing that the suicides were murder to the deaths of the two firemen in the Deutsche Bank building fire in 2007.

And obviously the connection between Donald Trump and Russian oligarchs. My question is, currently there is no evidence to prove these claims. There's a lot of smoke, but no fire. But do you feel Deutsche Bank has the capacity to commit these crimes? Well, wait, sorry, which crimes do you mean? Like basically all of the conspiracies surrounding uh deutsche bank from the fire to the to like potentially the suicides being murdered to the connections between trump and and the russian oligarchs like i'm obviously not trying to say that like do you believe in any of the conspiracies but do you think that deutsche bank had the capacity to pull those things off

i don't know is the short answer and it it's, you know, some of them for sure. Like were them illegally funding Russian oligarchs? I'm not a conspiracy theory. That's true. Right. Right. Like them. Is it possible that they were serving as a secret funnel for Russian oligarchs to finance Donald Trump? Yeah, that's like definitely possible. I don't haven't found evidence that it's true. And there's it may well not be be true but it's certainly possible is deutsche bank capable of orchestrating like assassinations of people i don't know i mean i have not seen anything to suggest that and deutsche bank in its defense here is the the ineptitude and disorganization at that bank is not that that kind of leans against them pulling off some sort of like savvy operation to kill people. I mean, they're,

they're very good at punishing people who dissent and sidelining them and firing them and kind of ruining their names. But it's not, I haven't seen any evidence of actual, like, literal, physical violence. They certainly have caused, and that's not to diminish at all, the harm that they've caused and the destruction, and in some cases, the deaths that they've caused all over the world. I mean, their illegal financing of regimes that are supposedly under international sanction, I mean, almost certainly contributed

to physical death and destruction in the Middle East for example but I have not seen I would definitely be surprised if it ever emerged that Deutsche Bank had like literally orchestrated a hit

on someone. Well related to criminal activity I just wanted to ask you if you would say that European and American law enforcement and regulators have approached it with a light touch, and if you would say that, if you have any speculation as to why. Yeah, I mean, they definitely have approached it with a light touch. I mean, there's, and I think there are a bunch of reasons. I mean, in Germany, I think it's pretty simple, which coming after Deutsche Bank and trying to aggressively investigate them, not because Deutsche Bank needed to be investigated, but because they were envious and wanted to essentially disadvantage a rival to their own domestic companies.

I think in the U.S., it's a little more complicated, but in some ways more damning, which is that there's a culture of deference and just kind of keeping things quiet in the regulatory community in America. And that's partly because there's this fear that if you've come down too hard on a bank, it could undermine public confidence in the bank and theoretically cause a bank run, which, by the way, is a concern that has been disproven over and over and over again. But there's also, and I always get people yelling at me

when I say this, but there's, I think, just the human psychology of this makes it indisputably true that there are a lot of people in the regulatory community who are supposed to be supervising these banks that secretly hope that they are going to get very rich working for these banks one day. And the best way to do that is not that they are there for like, okay, I'm not going to punish Deutsche Bank because I want to work there one day. But there is, I think, a cultural attitude that if you want to one day work in this industry, you need to be seen as

someone who is at least palatable to the industry. And that doesn't mean you don't investigate things or come down hard on them, but it does mean that you act in this kind of conventionally acceptable professional manner where you don't make a big deal about things, you don't try and blow things up, you try to work within the system. And I think that's led to a lot of regulators in the U.S., in particular at the Federal Reserve, have this just default position where, yeah, we'll slap you with a $50 million penalty, but we're not going to actually publicize it or we're not going to actually provide any details on what you did. You're just going to tell us, reassure us that we're going to stop misbehaving. And look, that's an approach regardless of the motivation of the people doing it. It's been a complete failure over the years. And the evidence of that is that banks like Deutsche Bank continue to operate and continue to commit crimes. If you would indulge me in one last chemtrails question, I just wanted to know if in your

research you've come across any evidence of any links between Deutsche Bank and any intelligence agencies. That's a good question. I mean, the one clear example of that, or not clear, the one example that I guess would be in Russia, where Deutsche Bank is and has been for well over a century now, kind of Deutsche Bank tried to get bigger in Russia under Joe Ackerman, the CEO at the time, one of the ways they did that was working very closely with a bank called VTB, which is a Russian bank that had historically been the bank that kind of helped the Kremlin. Because it was an international bank, it would help to fund KGB activities and things like that in different offices, different of its outposts around the world. And it was often, so it was known as the spy bank inside Russia. And it's essentially, I don't know if it's fully

owned by the Kremlin, but it's at least controlled by the Kremlin. And Deutsche Bank became not only very close operationally with the bank and their CEO has developed close relationships, but Deutsche Bank hired the CEO of VTB, God, whose name I am blanking on right now somehow, but Deutsche Bank hired his, oh, Koston, Andre Koston. Deutsche Bank hired his son in a senior capacity eventually to run their Russian business. VTB set up an investment banking operation

at the suggestion of Joe Ackerman, the Deutsche Bank CEO, and then proceeded to hire a lot of Deutsche Bank people to start that basically from the ground up. And so that was a very clear link between Deutsche Bank and a government-controlled institution in Russia that had clear and ongoing links to intelligence. Now, I mean, there are a million caveats that would apply there. And I'm sure, frankly, I don't think anyone really knows the full story of what was going on there. But other than that, there's nothing I can think of,

but that does not mean that it doesn't exist. With Deutsche Bank, I found a theme that was like people who had a net worth of about $1 to $5 billion using the bank as their personal rich dad who could solve problems by throwing money at them. But with companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, there's an article from MarketWatch from July 7th talking about how Deutsche Bank and Google are going to form a multi-year partnership. I'm terrified at the prospect of big tech taking advantage of the exploits of the banking industry. Do you think that my concerns are valid? You know, I don't know is the short answer. Yeah, I think your concerns are valid. I think there are, but I'm not sure I would kind of articulate it exactly that way. I mean, Deutsche Bank is becoming less and less relevant as the years pass

because of its financial problems and because of its retreat from its global ambitions. And so Google and Deutsche Bank teaming up on something is not, I mean, I can't remember the details of that, but I didn't get the sense that that was something that was, frankly, particularly promising. I think it's a bigger concern when you see the – and look, these tech companies have just almost unspeakable power these days. And if you pair that up with some of the strongest financial institutions in the world, that gives them even more power. Now, the counterargument to that is that the banks increasingly see a lot of these tech companies as their competitors, and rightly so. I mean, there's, you know, Apple is getting into the payments business.

Amazon is essentially taking over everything. Google, I'm not sure quite what they're doing but like there's uh uh facebook certainly is getting into or is at least toyed with the payment space um so i mean i actually think that in some ways it could become the case that the the traditional finance industry in walters actually becomes a bit of a counterweight to the expanding power of the tech community, which is, look, and tech is the biggest story in the world right now, business-wise, and for good reason, right? It's like we are all incredibly reliant on them.

They have enormous amounts of leverage over basically every aspect of our lives. And we're doing this talking right now on skype which is by microsoft and you know god only knows what they're hoovering up as we talk you know what i mean right right and uh uh so to me i mean banking up until 10 years ago had been i think the most important industry probably in america honestly and that is clearly the tech industry now has that mantle. And in some ways, the banks being forced to compete against these instead of just against themselves, but against these tech companies would be, I think, a healthy check on the power of these tech companies.

Yeah, that makes sense. I could see that. The last question I have is that, so Deutsche Bank is obviously connected to the atrocities of the Nazi party and they're partially responsible for the recklessness carried on by Epstein. Would you concur that the current global pandemic

and the mishandling of it in the United States due to enabling Donald Trump, as written in your book, is also partially on Deutsche Bank's hands? I don't know. I mean, I think that may be a bridge too far for me. I do think that it's, I mean, I've said this repeatedly in the past, that I think Donald Trump would have had much more trouble getting elected were it not for Deutsche Bank. And so if you wanted to kind of extrapolate from that, well, if Trump hadn't gotten elected,

would the coronavirus be, would the U.S. be in better shape vis-a-vis the coronavirus? And, but to me, that's like, you could also argue that, yeah, I mean, there's, to me, that's like a few dominoes too far. Sure, sure. I can understand that. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate it.

Everyone check out David Enrich's book, Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trailer of Destruction. Once again, David, thank you for being on our show. And yeah, hope you have a wonderful weekend. Yeah, same to you. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, buddy. All right. Take care, guys.