“Bloomberg – Deutsche Bank Inadvertently Made a $35 Billion Payment in a Single Transaction“
Look, it’s 5:00pm on a Thursday – I want to go home, open up a nice old world red. Something to get the pallet dancing while I watch some playoff hoops. Complex tannins, high acidity, but nothing too extravagant. A nice every day wine, a workhorse wine if you will – Produttori del Barbaresco, perhaps.
But all that is on hold until I stick it to John Cryan one more time. As soon as I saw this headline come across, I absolutely knew that this wasn’t a recent event, that they buried this thing and, now that Cryan is gone, somebody spilled the beans. Turns out, they did this before Easter and by my quick calcs that falls under our boy’s tenure. Some back office kid in Germany was tasked with wiring the variation margin that day to their clearinghouse, Eurex. That’s it, just send some money to a different account. A simple task for most, but when you’re DB, you manage to bungle the easiest of things.
Now, I don’t want to get on this lowly analyst too much. I understand fat fingers happen – that’s why there’s industry jargon for it. But when you’re wiring cash in excess of the bank’s entire market cap, I know for a fact that there are multiple channels that have to sign off on releasing a wire instruction that large (I started out in ops, don’t lie to me). So unless I’m missing something, at least two people decided to send $35B to their clearing house that day – and that, my friends, is what we call the Deutsche Bank difference.
P.S. – that wine link isn’t even an ad. That’s just, in my opinion, one of the better, reasonably priced, old world’s you can find. Do yourself a favor.