Chapter 6 delves into the heart of Deutsche Bank’s transformation towards a US investment bank. It situates the changes of Deutsche’s business model within its play of catch with US banks: To compete in Eurodollar markets, German banks had to find a way to institutionalise their connections to US money markets to improve their access to USD. The attempts to adopt liability management (LM) drove Deutsche’s partial uprooting from its home market to relocate to the US. This challenges the dominant narrative of a US imposition, instead recognising that the trajectory of change was driven by Deutsche’s strategies of extroversion. Tracing the specific practices of Deutsche’s foreign acquisitions and strategies on US money markets, this chapter reveals that Deutsche had to progressively change its traditional practices to accommodate the imperatives of LM. This transformation went from a change in funding strategies to acquire more USD to the corresponding adaptations on Deutsche’s asset side – from corporate loans to US residential mortgage-backed – or ‘toxic’ – securities. This chapter thus presents Deutsche’s move away from the centre of Germany Inc. towards a US investment bank as an outcome of the imperatives of extroverted financialisation.

This chapter details the increasingly indispensable part German big business played in expelling German Jews from economic life and dispossessing them, including in the annexed regions of Austria and the Czech lands. Avarice and self-defense were the principal motivators, with the latter becoming increasingly important as time passed.

The argument here is that German industry and finance were preprogrammed to participate in the murder of the Jews by decisions made before the war that could not be reversed. Big business thus collaborated fully in the process, becoming “bagmen” and “fences” for stolen Jewish property and providers of goods and services to death camps.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the early interest of German bankers in the Chinese market, including the failed attempt of the Deutsche Bank to establish branches in East Asia in the 1870s. The chapter then explores the early development of foreign banking in modern China from the middle of the nineteenth century and the growing interest of Chinese reformers and officials in using foreign capital and cooperating with foreign banks. We then return to the German bankers and investigate the activities of a study mission sent to China by a group of German banks and industrial concerns. Finally, the chapter traces the establishment of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in China by leading German banks in 1889.