A week into the European leg of the meltdown of the global financial system, Germany has hit major turbulence. Hypo Real Estate, a member of the DAX-30, Germany’s equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average looks to be on the verge of failing.
According to the German Magazine Der Spiegel, the planned bailout of the [...]

Below is an article I wrote that appears in this morning’s Guardian Newspaper in the UK. The crux of the article is that European politicians need to realise that their banks are not immune from the crisis that has hit the United States and that European banks are relatively under-capitalised.
The Europeans need to come [...]

I have only seen this story in Germany so far. The long and short is that this is a done deal. Deutsche Bank is expected to close the deal tomorrow. Helping to seal the deal is the fact that no layoffs are anticipated initially. This will make union leaders very happy, as they [...]

In Germany, there are two major concerns at the moment

The biggest banking merger in Germany’s history involving their #2 and #3 banks and Germany’s largest company Allianz
The slowdown in the economy

Commerz-DresdnerFirst is the Dresdner-Commerzbank situation. I have reported on this deal twice. See my posts, Commerzbank gobbles up Dresdner and Dresdner Bank: looking [...]

In the biggest German banking merger in history, Commerzbank, the third largest in Germany, has reached an agreement with Allianz to buy its banking subsidiary Dresdner Bank, Germany’s second largest, beating out an alleged better bid from state-owned China Development Bank (CDB). This is an historic merger with wide-reaching implications for the German and [...]

Last month, Hank Paulson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, was waxing prosaically about covered bonds and their benefits to mortgage markets. From his comments, one gets the impression he sees this a potential solution to preventing a future crisis in residential property in the US.
But covered bonds are not the silver bullet they have been [...]

In Europe, there has been a lot of talk about Germany’s second largest bank, Dresdner Bank, which is looking to get sold by its parent Allianz. Allianz, which also owns U.S. bond giant PIMCO, has had only trouble with Dresdner since it bought the company at the top of the market in 2000. [...]

As far back as May, I had warned that commercial property was destined for a bust — collateral damage in the real economy. In particular, I mentioned the U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) market as a particular problem for local and regional banks, which have large exposure to the CRE market. In May, I [...]

With sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) trolling the world for decent places to park their overflowing coffers of cash, the Germans have decided to stop them before they start.

The German government has approved legislation that would enable it to prevent foreign buyers from taking big stakes in key domestic companies.
The measure applies [...]

It’s pretty much official now: Europe is in recession. As I predicted late last month, the Eurozone has hit stall speed with Germany now reporting a fall in GDP for the second quarter.
The German economy, Europe’s largest, contracted for the first time in almost four years in the second quarter, led by a slump in [...]