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Comment by bla3 | Hacker News Reader

Subjectively it feels like NYT publishes a lot more negative articles about Deutsche Bank than about any other bank, or at least those articles get upvoted much more frequently here. Does anyone know what's up with that? I would've assumed that most banks are equally terrible.

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Deutsche Bank is currently implicated in (or at the very least, relevant to) ongoing news regarding the US President's finances.

That makes it more newsworthy.

Old habits die hard. Watch the movie 'Leon, the Professional, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110413/ , and you will know who you are. Old habits die hard. Cold or no cold/hot coffee.

So, are the Germans the new Russians then? Sounds like having failed to pin a dozen or so different crimes on Trump now his enemies are trying to harass his banks in retaliation for working with him? A classic strategy. Any bank can be found guilty of money laundering if the authorities want because the wording of the laws are so vague.

If you're interested, this dates back decades, and Deutsche Bank has been implicated in a lot of money laundering over the years.

If you're interested, there was a great podcast on the president's reliance on Deutsche Bank overlooking his never-ending bankruptcies and refusal to pay back loans, when no other bank would touch him.

https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2019/05/09/721726619/...

If you're not interested, you're just trolling.

I'm interested but I've also read a lot about money laundering over the years, and I know you could easily say "Barclays has been implicated in a lot of money laundering" or "HSBC has been" or "JP Morgan has been". Every bank has been rapped repeatedly because the laws boil down to "don't let criminals use banking services", which is an incredibly hard problem. Maybe Deutsche has a worse problem than other banks, I'm not sure, I'd want to see figures. But having seen how tightly linked AML is with politics, I'll reserve judgement on Trump and Deutsche.

I don't know if the NYT actually does publish more negative articles about Deutsche Bank than other banks. But if what you're perceiving matches reality, I would assume it is for the following two reasons:

1. Deutsche Bank facilitated a basket option trading strategy used by Renaissance Technologies, which has since earned the latter an investigation from the IRS for aggressive tax avoidance. RenTech is (unfortunately) synonymous with Robert Mercer's political activity in the eyes of many because he was a major partner and CEO of the hedge fund before he stepped down last year. This leads to my second point.

2. Deutsche Bank is (separately from RenTech) involved with Donald Trump in a number of real estate dealings, which other commenters have already cited. Regardless of your personal stance on the president, the NYT is going to spend time investigating any areas of financial misconduct it can find which may be directly or indirectly related to the president.

Also, Deutsche Bank (along with HSBC, iirc) took quite a lot of dirty money during the financial crisis. And there was that Libor thing...

Most (perhaps all) of the big banks have a list of fines, crimes, and scandals, but Deutsche Bank's list seems particuarly egregious.

Deutsche Bank is somewhat notable from a political standpoint; Donald Trump got loans there after no other banks would work with him, and retired SCOTUS justice Anthony Kennedy's son worked there.

Trump did a majority of his deals with them and both entities grew with each other. A lot of the deals had override approvals without a lot of review.

A link I posted earlier in this thread - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/trump-deutsche-b... provides more on this.

I wish there was more clarity here. It's my understanding that every large transaction requires some amount of manual approval at banks and this happens all the time every day. I have no issue believing Trump has shady banking/real estate deals, I think that's ultimately what might undo his Presidency, but transactions needing/receiving low level approvals doesn't read like a scandal to me.

American newspapers are blatantly nationalist. It is very hard to point to problems in their companies. Obesity problems? Nestle is is the villain: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil...

Environment accident with an American oil company? They are victims from a foreign gov: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/business/energy-environme...

Antivirus malicious companies? It's always Kaspersky problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/technology/kaspersky-lab-...

What???? There has been ton of bad press for Google, Facebook, Exxon Mobile, ...

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