Trump’s Deutsche Bank Records Subpoenaed by Mueller

The subpoena requested documents and data about the president’s accounts and other dealings

Since 1998, the lender has led or participated in loans of at least $2.5 billion to companies affiliated with Mr. Trump,
.. Deutsche Bank kept doing business with Mr. Trump after other banks pulled away, and even after Deutsche Bank itself became embroiled in a nasty legal battle over 2005 loans worth more than $600 million to build the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. After Mr. Trump missed loan payments in 2008, he and Deutsche Bank sued each other. They settled out of court in 2009.

.. Deutsche Bank this year faced repeated document requests from Democratic lawmakers scrutinizing the administration’s ties to Russia.

The Democrats lacked Republican support to compel Deutsche Bank to provide the information. Deutsche Bank lawyers have said U.S. bank-secrecy rules prohibited the lender from revealing details about its clients or their business with the bank without a subpoena or other formal request from Congress.

IMF Identifies Nine Big Banks Likely to Struggle With Profitability

Projects Deutsche Bank, Citi, Barclays and others could deliver subpar profits by 2019

The International Monetary Fund said some of the world’s largest financial institutions—including Deutsche Bank , DB -0.38% Citigroup , C +0.05% Barclays BCS -0.36% and a few Japanese institutions—could struggle in coming years to remain sufficiently profitable.

“About a third of banks by assets may struggle to achieve sustainable profitability, underscoring ongoing challenges and medium-term vulnerabilities,” the IMF said, referring to the world’s most important financial institutions.

 The report named nine financial institutions in all—

  1. Barclays BCS 
  2. Citigroup, 
  3. Société Générale , SCGLY -0.43% 
  4. UniCreditUNCFF -0.54% Group,
  5. Deutsche Bank, Barclays, 
  6. Standard Chartered , STAN -0.30%
  7. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group , SMFG +0.25% 
  8. Mizuho Financial Group MFG +0.00%and 
  9. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group MTU +0.45% —

as likely to deliver subpar profits.

 

.. “Institutions that are not profitable might not be able to generate enough capital in the future should adverse shocks hit,” Tobias Adrian, the director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, told reporters. “It might become a financial stability risk not to be profitable.”

.. The IMF said the consensus among private-sector bank-industry analysts was for a return on equity of less than 8% for each of those nine banks in the year 2019.

.. Deutsche Bank’s stock, for example, trades at less than half of its book value, or net worth, and has traded well below this level since 2010.

“We Have All the Funding We Need Out of Russia.”

“Trump was strutting up and down, talking to his new members about how they were part of the greatest club in North Carolina,” Dodson says. “And when I first met him, I asked him how he was — you know, this is the journalist in me — I said, ‘What are you using to pay for these courses?’ And he just sort of tossed off that he had access to $100 million.”

$100 million.

“So when I got in the cart with Eric,” Dodson says, “as we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’

.. None of the big US banks have done business with Trump for going on two decades. DeutscheBank is the only big bank that will touch him. And, of course, they’re not even a US bank. The point is, none of it mattered. The Trump’s had the Russia money. That’s all they needed.