Dark Towers

Enrich, a New York Times finance editor, wrote about Deutsche Bank's transformation from a conservative German commercial bank into an aggressive global investment bank and the consequences.

The institutional narrative traces the decision in the 1990s to build an investment bank by hiring aggressively from competitors, principally the team led by Edson Mitchell recruited from Merrill Lynch, and the culture that produced. Enrich argues the bank paid for growth it could not risk-manage, that its systems and controls never caught up with the businesses it was running, and that the German supervisory structure did not understand what the London and New York operations were doing.

The misconduct catalogue is extensive. The bank was central to LIBOR manipulation. It ran a mirror trading operation in Moscow that moved billions of dollars out of Russia through matched trades executed in Moscow and London. It sold mortgage securities its own staff described internally in unfavourable terms. It processed transactions for sanctioned entities. It was involved in the 1MDB matter and in tax-driven structures across multiple jurisdictions. Enrich documents the fines, which accumulated into the billions.

The Trump material is a substantial part. Deutsche Bank was the only major institution willing to lend to Donald Trump after his earlier defaults, and Enrich traces the relationship, the internal disagreements about it, and the lending decisions made against the private bank's own analysis.

The narrative is organised around Bill Broeksmit, a senior risk executive who died by suicide in 2014, and his son's subsequent search for what his father had known.

Enrich's reporting is well sourced and the bank did not cooperate. The book's structure around one individual's death gives it a shape the underlying material does not naturally have, and readers may find the connection asserted more than demonstrated.