by John Rubino
Dollar Collapse
Calling Wall Street’s banks stupid and dangerous is like calling the sun “big and warm.” It’s a clear understatement of an obvious fact. The same goes for calling Japan and China economically clueless. Their actions pretty much guarantee that they’ll ultimately enter some sort of death spiral.
Germany, meanwhile, is many things, but clueless and stupid aren’t normally on the list. So why is that country’s biggest bank causing nightmares for global policy makers and investors? Because – in a sign of just how close we are to the end of the fiat currency/fractional reserve banking era – Deutsche Bank is behaving in ways that would make executives at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns step back in alarm. It seems, for example, to have become a derivatives junkie. Like a Vegas high-roller who can’t stop raising his bets, DB’s exposure to this unregulated, largely off-balance-sheet market now exceeds not just its host country’s GDP, but that of its entire continent: