It’s rarely a good sign when politicians, in the middle of a crash in the share price of their country’s biggest financial institution, declare there’s nothing to worry about. Such remarks often just feed a sense of panic. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, would have been better advised to say nothing about Deutsche Bank.
But it is also true that Scholz was exaggerating only slightly when he said that “Deutsche Bank has fundamentally modernised and reorganised its business model and is a very profitable bank.” The modernisation has some way to go but, on the pure numbers, Deutsche is not the crisis-ridden, scandal-engulfed creature that it was in 2016-18.
