Doomsayers Enjoying a Field Day with Deutsche Bank

A tiny but apparently growing number of pundits is pretty sure the Deutsche Bank will shortly tumble and fall. As a systemic – if not essential – bank, the DB will not descend into insolvency on its own. Those in the know predict that at least two other main players, Citigroup and Barclays, will fail as well. Much like dominoes, scores of lesser banks will follow suit.

Financial mayhem, economic doom and societal gloom on an unprecedented scale are in store for the world. However, in the end gold will save the day purging the global financial system of funny money and ensuring a return to honest, as opposed to creative, banking.

Repeat the above about 10,000 times and you’ll soon understand the nature of the Internet and the practice of news aggregation: automated websites that fill an untold number of pages by pulling in news articles from across the net.

The rumblings regarding the Deutsche Bank’s future prospects, or lack thereof, originated with two pundits. One is a former head trader at the Royal Bank of Scotland who fancies the title “guerrilla economist”. The other is Mr Jim Willie, a statistician and economic analyst with some 23 years of experience under his belt.

“A tiny but apparently growing number of pundits is pretty sure the Deutsche Bank will shortly tumble and fall.”

Mr Willie posted a rather longish essay on the GoldenJackass website. As the first part of the name implies, this site is a holdout of a peculiar species of economists clamouring for the return of the gold standard. In his essay Mr Willie sketches a dire future brought about by robber bankers whose despicable antics end up destroying the fiat monetary system.

For Mr Willie there is no doubt that gold is the answer to all our troubles to come. The essay, perhaps unintentionally, also reaffirms the old adage: There are lies; there are damn lies and then there are statistics (attributed to Mark Twain).

Meanwhile the guerrilla economist, also a harbinger of the Deutsche Bank’s demise, gathers a modest following. The American broadcaster, film maker, journalist and financial analyst Max Keiser, whose Keiser Report airs on the Russian RT network, late last month felt the need to inform the world via a tweet that the DB now is on “suicide watch”. Mr Keiser received this precious nugget of information from an unnamed source in Geneva.

Mr Keiser is the founder of the Karmabanque hedge fund which was recently described by The Guardian as a “fantastical scheme”. The newspaper also accused Mr Keiser of trying to carve out a living “beyond the normal forces and controls of society”.

So if we are to believe a cast consisting of a mysterious guerrilla economist, an apologist for the gold standard and a notorious schemer with airtime on Mr Putin’s mouthpiece, the Deutsche Bank and similarly large banks in the UK and the US are quite doomed. And so are we by the way.

Now that’s not to say that all is peachy and systemic important banks do not face serious issues. However the end is not nearly as neigh as some doomsayers are now proclaiming.