“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, …”

This is a story of two banks, both of which were full of thieves.
Perhaps you've heard of the 5,300 'bad apples' at Wells Fargo that management was somehow unaware of? Well, a funny thing...

Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.
"They ruined my life," Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.
Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.
Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.
...
One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.

Massive, systemic fraud we can overlook. But punctuality? That's serious.
So serious that Wells Fargo is a far cry from being an exception.

One former banker at a regional bank told CNNMoney he witnessed the practice at his company.
"The customers wouldn't even know," said the banker, who insisted his name not be used. "Wells Fargo isn't the only one. This is an industry-wide problem."
Another scam this banker witnessed involved employees rearranging debit charges on customer accounts to maximize the size of the overdraft fees they experienced.

However, I don't want to talk about Wells Fargo.
I want to talk about Citibank.

The only reason the Republican-controlled Senate is holding this hearing is because the Wells Fargo fake-account story got a lot of coverage in the media when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced a $185 million settlement over the charges on September 8. The reason the story got a lot of media coverage is because it’s a simple story to tell: widely respected bank opens two million accounts for its customers without their knowledge or permission, sometimes illegally funneling money to the new account from the old account to generate fees.
In July of last year, when Citibank, the deposit-taking retail bank settled charges with the CFPB for $700 million for deceptively selling add-on products to credit card customers, the Senate Banking Committee yawned and did nothing. The story didn’t get major press attention because it was a complicated story to tell. Among a long list of fraudulent practices, the CFPB found that Citibank led 2.2 million customers to believe they were paying to have their credit card monitored for fraud and identity theft, “when, in fact, these services were either not being performed at all, or were only partially performed,” according to the CFPB.
The CFPB charges against Citibank came exactly two months after Citbank’s parent, Citicorp, pleaded guilty to a felony with the Justice Department in connection with the rigging of foreign currency. On the same day, another U.S. mega bank, JPMorgan Chase, also pleaded guilty to a felony related to the same crime. Both banks are more than a century old and both banks, on May 20 of last year, pleaded guilty to a felony for the first time in their history.

So while it's fun to cheer on Senator Warren, the fact is that the worst crimes being committed by banksters generally get ignored by the news media.
JP Morgan Chase may be even worse than Citibank, but that's another story.

Fraud and corruption aren't just endemic to the U.S. banking system. Fraud and corruption are the banking systems' foundations.
The U.S. banking system has evolved into an entrenched criminal enterprise.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, the oldest bank in the world, Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena, is about to ask for a public bailout.
But that's not the bank I want to talk about. I want to talk about Deutsche Bank.

Germany’s biggest bank was already ranked among the worst-capitalized lenders in European stress tests before U.S. authorities demanded $14 billion during initial talks to settle a probe into how it handled mortgage securities during the 2008 financial crisis. The announcement led Deutsche Bank’s riskiest bonds to plunge.
Since February, the bank’s shares have dropped to record lows amid investor concern that the lender is running out of options to boost capital. It’s struggling to sell its German retail unit Postbank, and the disposal of its British insurance business has been drawn out by a regulatory inquiry. At $14 billion, the U.S. claim would cost the bank more than twice the 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion) it’s set aside for litigation. The bank has said it doesn’t intend to pay anywhere near that amount.
Merkel’s government is now maintaining a public silence on Deutsche Bank’s woes.

Deutsche Bank is Europe's largest bank with the second largest derivatives portfolio in the world.

Deutsche Bank, one of Europe’s behemoths, is in very deep trouble having lost 90% 0f its share price value since 2007, has been falling sharply all this last year (48% loss this year) and, with its $42 Trillion in Derivatives exposure was singled out by the IMF, as the bank which ,

“appears to be the most important net contributor to systemic risks…”

Obviously Deutsche Bank is Too-Big-To-Fail, but is it also Too-Big-To-Save?
Germany would have to violate its own rules to bail out Deutsche Bank, which would be another nail in the coffin of the Euro.