A New York Times business reporter delves into the corrupt corporate culture of one of the world's most powerful financial institutions and its ties to the current U.S. President.
David Enrich delivers a master class in financial sleuthing. The New York Times’ financial editor follows the money, plows through paper and talks to dozens of people in the bank’s ecosystem. There are names, places and computer files. This is a first-rate read ... Like a discordant melody that haunts disturbing lyrics, Dark Towers is woven with the life and the 2014 suicide of Bill Broeksmit, a former Deutsche executive ... His death imparts to Enrich’s book an air of mystery ... Dark Towers is an excellent primer for what may well await [President Trump].
Dark Towers offers a compelling, if familiar, thesis: that unchecked ambition twisted a pillar of German finance into a reckless casino and fostered a culture in which amorality and, ultimately, criminality thrived. Deutsche is intriguing not only because its leaders chased growth at any cost—resulting in mountains of losses, as it always does—but because it once was the emblem of European institutional lending, the near-opposite of Wall Street short-termism ... [employee William] Broeksmit’s suicide elevated his usefulness as a narrative prop, perhaps more than Deutsche warranted. Enrich doggedly prowls the psychological shadows for clues about what might have driven him ... Dark Towers suffers some unfortunate tropes of business journalism ... the bank is 'fueled' by greed. Perhaps 'fuel' should be reserved for energy writers ... Enrich has given us a thorough, clearly written and generally levelheaded account of a bank that lost its way.
A revelatory book...that also has all the elements of a page-turning mystery novel ... Enrich...couldn’t have made up a more intriguing tale than the story he uncovered at Deutsche Bank. The result, Dark Towers, is a real-life account that will confirm every suspicion you have about the greed and incompetence at the heart of modern finance ... but in the end Enrich can’t quite pull it off. Part of the problem is that the demands of constructing a compelling, dramatic narrative lead him to ignore too much about the bank’s operations, its financial performance and what else was happening in the industry to put these dramatic events in context and make it a credible business history. Enrich organizes the book around the career of one banker, Bill Broeksmit ... But in the end, the stories of the bank and the banker do not track each other in a way that feels true and convincing. Enrich certainly did a tremendous amount of reporting ... The biggest shortcoming of Dark Towers, however, is that while it raises provocative questions about Deutsche Bank and Trump, it never quite answers them.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
