Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spanish/Galician Life - I missed the Carnaval procession in Pontevedra city on Saturday evening. Which is a shame as I would've enjoyed the participants/floats taking a satirical look at the Catholic Church:-
and at the mayor, as Darth Vader supervising his modernisation of O Burgo bridge:-
- It seems to be compulsory for every newspaper in Spain to run at least one major exposé a year of prostitution here. On Saturday it was the turn of La Voz de Galicia, which reported that Spain is 'the leader' in prostitution and that 1 in 3 Spanish men have had recourse to a 'sex worker'. Brothels are, of course, ubiquitous throughout Spain - usually garishly visible on the edges of towns/cities - but, needless to say, advantage is now being taken of the availability of flats from Airbnb and the like. For all the reporting, in almost 20 years, I haven't seen the slightest evidence of a political will to address this situation and the large-scale human trafficking it involves. As with the financing of the Catholic church by the state. Strange country . . .
- Land/property ownership can be complicated in Galicia, possibly more so than in other parts of Spain. A local paper reported last week that there are 320 fincas(plots) in the region of unknown ownership. And that the Xunta is seeking for these to pass to the region and not to the state.
- I read yesterday that Spain's 'reading index' is up but that 31% of the populace never reads a book. As it happened, I was partaking of my tiffin* opposite this chap, who sat for more than an hour with his little dog on his lap, content to simply gaze around. The man, of course. Not the dog. Which didn't even bother to do that:-
* First definition, of course.
The EU
- Those betting Brexit would take a heavy toll on Britain, have discovered that, much to their surprise, the EU stands as the first collateral casualty. The vacuum left in the budget by the UK departure has fuelled bitter acrimony between the member states, especially in those receiving large amounts of EU money, such as Spain.
The USA
- I wonder if it'll ever be established whether Fart is - inter alia - stupendously stupid or is cleverly playing to a gallery of idiots. Whatever, can that polarised country ever regain global respect? Does it want to?
The Way of the World
- The annual Easter Egg Hunt of the UK's National Trust will be no more from 2021. The increasingly woke organisation wishes to dissociate itself from chocolate, a fascistic confection of sugar, milk and cocoa beans that kills children.
- Rather more seriously . . . The article below reviews a book which details how Deutsche Bank moved from being a small German provincial bank to, at one time, the largest bank in the world. Along the way, it financed Donald Trump when no one else would and permitted his rise to the US presidency. It's a jaw-slackening story of vast greed and corruption. Which possibly won't come as a surprise to many.
Social Media
- Google is profiting from crime and scam victims, making £77bn a year from ads which include tens of millions paid by scammers or rogue schemes to get to the top of lists. Lawyers say that victims who have lost out to scammers promoted high up in Google search results may have a legal claim against the $1trillion internet giant. But having a claim and actually getting money from a company employing the best lawyers in the world are 2 different things, of course. As governments are discovering on the issue of taxation.
Spanish
- Phrases/Words of the Day:-
- Familia political: In-laws
- Acorralar: To round up, to corner, to collect
Finally . . .
- Water: And now I have a leak from under the bath - just as I'm about to make a 3 day camino to Santiago from Pontevedra. Maybe I'll do some praying this time . . .
- More words:-
- Fontanero; Plumber
- Fuga: Leak, escape, flight
THE ARTICLE
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich
If you love to hate big swinging-dick bankers and Donald Trump — and the two go together, as this investigation reveals — this is the book for you. David Enrich, the New York Times finance editor who brilliantly chronicled how traders rigged the Libor interest rate for profit in The Spider Network (2017), is back and this time he skewers Deutsche Bank and the American president.
The Deutsche of Enrich’s book is the kind of bank that should only exist in a television drama. In the 2000s, during and after the global financial crisis, it put short-term profits above everything. Enrich writes that it helped clients to commit tax fraud, illegally conceal debt and launder money; helped to spark the global financial crisis by becoming one of the most prolific peddlers of mortgage-backed securities it knew would fail; enabled clients to evade sanctions against Iran and Syria; conspired to fix key interest rates; lied to the market, clients, shareholders and regulators; and ignored and, in some cases, fired whistle-blowers while rewarding its most reckless and high-earning employees with annual bonuses that, for one trader, totalled $100 million in one year. The bank, based in twin towers in Frankfurt, suffered multibillion-dollar fines and heavy losses but is still trading.
Deutsche also helped put Trump in the White House. He could not have cast himself as a successful entrepreneur and leveraged his celebrity to become the most powerful man in the world without Deutsche. The bank was the money behind Trump’s money. Over 20 years it lent him $2 billion on very favourable terms to develop luxury high rises, hotels and golf courses. No other leading bank would deal with “The Donald” because of his reputation for stiffing lenders. For good measure, Deutsche bankrolled Trump’s extended family, advancing loans to his son, Don Jr, and lending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner family and its companies. Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, is, like his father-in-law, a real-estate developer.
Enrich reports that, starting in the 1990s, a new generation of hard-charging, amoral Deutsche bankers broke every rule in the book in their mad scramble to transform a provincial German lender into a Wall Street titan — at one point it was the biggest bank in the world with $2 trillion in assets. No client was too stinky to deal with. Not even the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who remained a valued client even after overwhelming evidence emerged that he was a sexual predator who trafficked young girls.
No lie was too big to tell. To keep the traders happy, the shoeshine guy at the bank’s London trading floor is said to have had a lucrative sideline peddling cocaine and prostitutes. “Recklessness, chaos and greed” were the bank’s “organising principles”, Enrich writes. Not for nothing was Deutsche known as “Douche Bank”.
It is Deutsche’s relationship with Trump that makes for the best chapters in Enrich’s exposé. Trump has long insisted he is a billionaire, and told Deutsche when he first approached the bank for finance that he was worth roughly $3 billion. But Enrich reveals that when Deutsche executives examined his accounts they estimated the figure was $788 million, a quarter of his boast. Despite his flexible approach to accounting, Deutsche agreed to work with him, starting by lending him money for residential developments and encouraging wealthy Russians to buy the new homes there to help them to move cash out of Russia.
One of Deutsche’s biggest loans to Trump was to fund the construction of the Trump Tower hotel and apartments in Chicago. But the financial crisis meant Trump could not repay $334 million of the loan. He needed to wriggle out of the contract. But how? After hearing that the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, had declared the crisis a “credit tsunami”, he instructed his lawyers to claim that the credit crunch was an act of God and therefore covered by the force majeure clause in the loan agreement. What was a tsunami if not a natural disaster? The contract could not be enforced. To add insult to financial injury, he sued Deutsche, accusing it of “predatory lending practices”. He sought damages totalling 10 times the amount he owed. Deutsche caved and granted him an extension.
This book lacks the driving narrative of The Spider Network. Enrich introduces too many characters and has a maddening habit of sometimes using their first names and at other times their surnames. As a result, it can be hard to follow. The final third of the book gets hopelessly bogged down in the story of the son of a Deutsche banker who tries to get to the bottom of his father’s suicide. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t. But the first two-thirds are such a cracking read you end up cheering him on.
It helps that some of Enrich’s writing is devastatingly accurate. His description of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos is as good as you’ll get. “It’s where the world’s most important and self-important people gather each year to admire each other under the guise of making the world a better place... with the aid of alcohol and unburdened by opposing viewpoints.”
Some of the anecdotes are pure Gordon Gekko. When Edson Mitchell, a senior Deutsche executive, drives to the house of a banker from a rival firm he wants to hire and offers him millions of dollars a year in basic salary, the banker agrees to sign up — on one condition: that Mitchell gives him the BMW that he has driven over in. Mitchell tosses him the keys and gets a cab home. Another banker who travels to Mitchell’s house to be wooed is not so lucky. When he rejects Mitchell’s job offer, Mitchell gets his driver to drop the man off at a nearby bus station where he ends up having to spend the night.
This is an important book because it reveals how one bank, with questionable business practices to put it mildly, made it possible for Trump to bounce back from multiple bankruptcies, cast himself as a business visionary, and eventually run for president and win. Deutsche Bank is the commander-in-chief’s financial enabler-in-chief — and, for many, sins don’t come any bigger.
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