Deutsche Bank AG: CEO History

The rehabilitation is real, though the journey left scars. The 1998 acquisition of Bankers Trust, at the time the largest cross-border banking merger ever executed, was the moment Deutsche Bank fully committed to Wall Street competition. European banks broadly trade at discounts to book value that their American counterparts do not. The derivative products and structured credit capabilities it brought were enormously profitable in the early 2000s and contributed to the misconduct that generated $18-plus billion in post-2010 legal costs. The acquisition price looks unambiguously too low once you account for the true all-in cost. German industrialists and merchants had long depended on British and French banks to finance international trade and provide access to foreign currency markets. A unified German state needed a bank that could represent German commercial interests directly, without routing through London or Paris. The bank's first overseas branch opened in Shanghai in 1872. By the late nineteenth century, Deutsche Bank was financing the construction of the Baghdad Railway, providing infrastructure loans to the Ottoman Empire, and establishing itself as the financial arm of German imperial expansion. It was not a retail institution; it was an instrument of national economic policy. The twentieth century tested the institution through two world wars and a currency collapse that wiped out the savings of an entire generation. The post-war reformation in 1948 split the bank into ten regional institutions under Allied occupation before those entities were gradually re-merged through the 1950s. That ambition drove revenues for a decade and generated the misconduct that drove penalties for the decade after.