Dark Towers
Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
David Enrich · 2020 · Business
13 min · 13 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
David Enrich traces how Deutsche Bank, once a staid German lender, transformed itself into a reckless global investment bank chasing Wall Street profits, and how that transformation led it into money laundering, sanctions violations, and a decades-long lending relationship with Donald Trump that no other major bank would touch. The book argues that Deutsche Bank's internal culture of risk-taking without accountability made it uniquely willing to enable clients, including a future American president, that safer institutions had already rejected.
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Who it's for
- Readers curious about how a European bank became entangled in American political scandal - Finance professionals interested in bank risk culture and regulatory failure - Anyone following the Trump-Russia financial questions who wants the documented backstory
What’s inside
- 1A Conservative Bank Chases Wall Street1 min
Deutsche Bank's decision in the 1990s to abandon its cautious German banking traditions in favor of American-style investment banking planted the seeds of every later scandal.
- 2Edson Mitchell and the Cowboys of London1 min
One American banker, Edson Mitchell, single-handedly rewired Deutsche Bank's culture by recruiting an aggressive trading team that prized profit over caution.
- 3Subprime and the Road to 20081 min
Deutsche Bank's push into mortgage securitization before the 2008 crisis shows the same risk-blind culture that later shaped its dealings with Trump and Russian money.
- 4The Bank Nobody Else Would Touch1 min
Deutsche Bank became Trump's lender of last resort precisely because every other major bank had already refused him after his history of defaults.
- 5Rosemary Vrablic and the Private Bank1 min
A single private banker, Rosemary Vrablic, made Trump a priority client precisely because his business, however risky, generated fees the private bank badly needed.
- 6The Mirror Trading Scandal1 min
Deutsche Bank's Moscow office ran a mirror-trading scheme that moved roughly ten billion dollars out of Russia, revealing systemic failures in the bank's anti-money-laundering controls.
- 7Whistleblowers, Suicide, and Suppressed Warnings1 min
Deutsche Bank repeatedly silenced or ignored internal warnings about risk and misconduct, and the death of risk executive Bill Broeksmit symbolizes the human cost of that culture.
- 8Loans That Kept Coming1 min
Deutsche Bank kept extending and refinancing Trump's loans even as his 2008 lawsuit, his bankruptcy history, and mounting scrutiny should have made the bank walk away.
- 9Subpoenas and the Fight Over Trump's Records1 min
Congressional and prosecutorial efforts to obtain Deutsche Bank's Trump-related records after 2018 exposed how difficult it is to hold a systemically important bank accountable even with legal subpoenas.
- 10A Bank Built to Fail Its Own Rules1 min
Deutsche Bank's Trump relationship was not an isolated lapse but one symptom of an institution whose scale had permanently outpaced its capacity for internal control.
About David Enrich
David Enrich is business investigations editor at The New York Times, where he has covered banking and finance for over a decade, including extensive reporting on Deutsche Bank's ties to Donald Trump. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and is also the author of The Spider Network, about the Libor rigging scandal.
