'Tis the season for giving. And Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann has promised a 25% pretax return to the bank's shareholders. How, in the is year of failed banks and unprecedented write-downs, does the bank hope to achieve these extraordinary profits? In the US the bank has a creative business model: foreclose on tens of thousands of residential properties, evict the homeowners, and let the properties deteriorate through willful neglect. The City of Cincinnati has finally had enough:
Cincinnati wants Deutsche
Bank […]to pay for what officials say is neglect of
foreclosed-upon properties that's worsening blight in city
neighborhoods.
Representatives
appear often in local courts to prosecute foreclosure actions against
property owners, the city says in a lawsuit, but don't show up when
Cincinnati asks them to maintain abandoned properties titled to them.
The city wants repayment for boarding up, demolishing and the other
work done to Deutsche Bank properties. The suit didn't
specify an amount.
"This
lawsuit is one attempt to end the abuse of our local neighborhoods and
the loss of value associated with the foreclosure crisis," according to
a statement released by the city Tuesday.
Deutsche
Bank, in an Enquirer analysis published last year, had bought the most
foreclosed properties in Hamilton County in 2007 – 265. The
German banking company didn't own even one parcel in the county three
years before.
Now the practices of Herr Ackermann are earning the wrath of God – or at least God's representatives on earth. The head of Germany's Protestant Church, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, had harsh criticism of Ackermann and his bank in a Christmas Eve interview:
bankers had a duty to look beyond the short term and to ensure
stability: "Never again should a Deutsche Bank chief executive set a
profit goal of 25 per cent." Such goals drove up profit expectations to
unsustainable levels and amounted to "a form of idolatry", he said. "In
the current circumstances, money has become a god."
Huber went on to say in his interview that the entire derivatives-driven financial bubble created by the banks was nothing more than "a dance around the Golden Calf". In the Bible, the Israelites constructed a golden calf as an idol from gold jewelry. The next day Moses, upon learning of this, had 3000 killed as punishment. Fortunately for Herr Ackermann, the day after Huber's interview was Christmas Day – a bank holiday – and there was not a banker to be seen in the City of Frankfurt.
