- As America unpicks a carefully contrived security blanket…
- .. Deutsche Bank is re-learning how to survive
The Bank’s hitherto low-profile role in American foreclosures has been revealed as permeating the entire country, and is impressive in the wrong way too. In Chicago, Illinois, for example, it foreclosed over 550 big apartment complexes during 2009, streets ahead of its competitors in that city. Cleveland, Ohio saw nearly 5,000 homeowners evicted between the years 2002 and 2006 by Deutsche Bank – in many other American cities similar patterns are emerging, and beginning to earn it the title of America’s Foreclosure King.
To date, the spinners at Deutsche Bank have pretended that the financial giant had little involvement in America’s sorry foreclosure tale – their lords and masters did not even apply for Treasury aid. Part of its recipe for staying out of trouble involved jumping ship where dodgy deals developed, leaving competitors to mop up the mess. More lately, however, news has emerged as to exactly how deep Deutsche Bank sunk its claws into the sum-prime mortgage market, and what the impact of its damage control has been on the American nation.
The Bank is currently trustee of approximately 1,000,000 American properties according to its own statistics. It is also one of the big four American Banks that between them control about 90% of the Nation’s mortgages. It contributed significantly to the current economic crisis when $20 billion’s worth of its own real estate security deals collapsed, and sent shock waves into American markets.
As the American property market crisis deepened, and an increasing number of American families lost their homes, Deutsche Bank sailed on as if there was nothing untoward. That’s because it simply acts as the financier, leaving service providers like Litton Loan to do its dirty work, and collect the flak on its behalf. More recently, it has come under the spotlight of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which would like to know how it and several other investment banks arrange their affairs, and whether this deceives the markets. Thus far Goldman Sachs has offered to grease the Commission’s palm with one billion dollars to avert prosecution – will the Hamburg bank follow suit?
Deutsche Bank has other problems too – because it did not itself issue the mortgages, some that it foreclosed on have been reversed when it could not produce the papers. Notwithstanding this, its service providers continue to evict. They have even tried to put new, compliant owners on the streets who bought the properties on bargain short sales.
All these revelations have created a legal and public relations disaster for Deutsche Bank. Like King Kong on a City Skyscraper, it has become so pre-occupied with swatting troublesome flies that it is having difficulty keeping its eye on the bigger, government bogyman that is emerging.
Information provided by www.foreclosuredatabank.com – the company with the best and biggest foreclosure listings.
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Written by Alex Rolim.
