NYT Admits Deutsche Bank-RU-Trump Is Bull Shit

[kybkh]

Fake news starting to admit their stories are bullshit.

http://archive.ph/ZqfJ3

Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump, rather than being an odd outlier, is a kind of object lesson in how the bank lost its way. The company was hungry for growth, especially in the United States, and it was happy to cozy up to clients that better-­established players viewed as too damaged or dangerous. Along the way, it missed one opportunity after another to extricate itself from the Trump relationship or at least slow its expansion. With hindsight, the procession of miscues and bad decisions appears almost comical.

After insinuating there is a Deutsche Bank Trump connection....

If they ever become public, the bank’s Trump records could serve as a Rosetta Stone to decode the president’s finances. Executives told me that the bank has, or at one point had, portions of Trump’s personal federal income tax returns going back to around 2011. (­Deutsche Bank lawyers told a federal court last year that the bank does not have those returns; it is unclear what happened to them. The Trump Organization did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The bank has documents detailing the finances and operations of his businesses. And it has records about internal deliberations over whether and how to do business with Trump — a paper trail that most likely reflects some bank employees’ concerns about potentially suspicious transactions that they detected in the family’s accounts.

One reason all these files could be so illuminating is that the bank’s relationship with Trump extended well beyond making simple loans. ­Deutsche Bank managed tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s personal assets. The bank also furnished him with other services that have not previously been reported: providing sophisticated financial instruments that shielded him from risks and outside scrutiny, and making introductions to wealthy Russians who were interested in investing in Western real estate. If Trump cheated on his taxes, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If his net worth is measured in millions, not billions, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know. If he secretly got money from the Kremlin, ­Deutsche Bank would probably know.

Until the 1990s, ­Deutsche Bank was a provincial German company with a limited presence outside Europe. Today it is a $1.5 trillion colossus, one of the world’s largest banks, with offices in 59 countries — and, thanks to its well-­documented pattern of violating laws, an international symbol of greed, recklessness and hubris. Its rap sheet includes manipulating international currency markets; playing a central role in rigging a crucial benchmark interest rate known as Libor; whisking billions of dollars in and out of Iran, Syria, Myanmar and other countries in violation of sanctions; laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Russian oligarchs, among many others; and misleading customers, investors and American, German and British regulators.