On YouTube there is a fairly recent documentary on the DW Documentary channel, called Gambled away in the financial crisis - The Deutsche Bank story. Many of these documentaries never, unfortunately, go into the real details of the types of people who gain roles and climb up the corporate ladder, which is the cause of so many disasters, those who are narcissists, psychopaths, or sociopaths, many of whom have these characteristics, but also why so many of these firms have so-called compliance officers, risk managers and internal auditors and yet none of these who can be earning hundreds of thousands of pounds, dollars or euros seem not to do anything let alone the oversight of financial regulators. But this is a topic for another day.

Greed surpasses everything in the corporate world, as does the lust for that power and acceptance by your so-called peer group. 

But the reason I have written this piece is that my focus is mainly on price movements of securities and I want to show an illustration that the German economy is not dominated by publicly owned banking conglomerates, rather a very diverse group of mostly family-owned firms that have close relationships with their banking partners, which are privately owned or mutually owned by their members.

The two main German listed banks which grew through their acquisitions and mergers have done appallingly since the beginning of January 1999, before the dot.com boom reached its then peak and then went bust so many companies. Yet again, it is the USA banking firms which have done much better in terms of their share prices than the German banks mentioned in my chart against benchmarks of the S&P 500, Stoxx 600 and DAX. It is the German banks that have dragged the performance of the DAX down for this period.