Started: 5/9/2020
Completed: 5/15/2020
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: New York Times
Review:
Deutsche Bank just seems toxic. Employees commit suicide. The bank interacts with criminals hiding assets. There are endless tales of shell companies, oddly cozy relationships, and disgusting risk taken on behalf of the share holders. Shady internal bookkeeping coupled with with underfunded regulation has allowed Deutsche Bank to wreak havoc on the world's economies.
Meanwhile, Trump's hand along with his relatives is all over the bank. The question the book raises, but cannot answer, is whether Trump and family loans are backed by Russian banks. It seems possible, but there is no proof in the material in this volume, just a smoke.
It is hard for me to highly recommend this book because there is an enormous attempt to humanize the protagonists by going into great deal into their personal lives. I think that Enrich did this in an effort to understand the motives for the actions taken and this is part of what keeps the book from being a dry report. On the other hand, a dry report would be much shorter. In a sense, the motives don't matter to me, so I'm not interested. In another sense, there is a certain fascination in trying to figure out how people who do this kind of underhanded stuff that destroys so many other people justify their acts to themselves. In some cases, they find they cannot live with themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment