Dark Towers Quotes

“Around the time that he canned Mike Offit, Mitchell organized a corporate getaway for hundreds of employees. The retreat was in a luxury resort overlooking Lake Maggiore, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. The bankers flew into Milan, and a fleet of Mercedes sedans chauffeured them into the mountains.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum—where the world’s most important and self-important people gather each year to admire each other under the guise of making the world a better place—was in full swing.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“By 2006, Deutsche had zapped nearly $11 billion into Iran, Burma, Syria, Libya, and the Sudan, providing desperately needed hard currency to the world’s outlaw regimes and single-handedly eroding the effectiveness of peaceful efforts to defuse international crises.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“To employees, the eras of Ackermann and Jain had become parables for the perils of growing too fast, pursuing profits above all else, not caring about clients’ integrity, not taking the time to integrate businesses.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“He stood out in an industry brimming with socially maladroit math whizzes and slightly sociopathic type A personalities.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“both cases, Deutsche steered very rich Russians into the Trump ventures, according to people who were involved in the deals—just a couple of years after American regulators had punished the bank for whisking Russian money into the U.S. financial system via Latvia.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“have had to put up any hard assets as collateral, and the deal soon died.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“In the Middle East, Iran was trying to fill a power vacuum left by the demise of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi dictatorship. To do that, it needed to keep its neighbor’s fledgling democracy unstable. What better way to accomplish that than by waging a relentless campaign of bloody violence? The hundreds of millions of dollars that Deutsche wired to Iranian banks provided vital funding for the sanctioned country to pay for its terrorism. Soon Iraq was being ripped apart by violence. Roadside bombs detonated all over the country, targeting the country’s fragile government and the U.S. military forces that were trying to keep the peace.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“By 2006, Deutsche had zapped nearly $11 billion into Iran, Burma, Syria, Libya, and the Sudan, providing desperately needed hard currency to the world’s outlaw regimes and single-handedly eroding the effectiveness of peaceful efforts to defuse international crises.*”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“So any Syrian transactions should be treated STRICTLY confidential and should involve any colleagues on a ‘Must-Know’ basis only! . . . We do not want to create any publicity or other ‘noise’ in the markets or media.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“One day in 1998, a real estate broker called Offit: “Would you make a loan to Donald Trump?” Trump at the time was a casino magnate known for his occasional showbiz hijinks and his on-and-off dealings with organized crime figures. He also was a deadbeat, having defaulted on loans to finance his Atlantic City casinos and stiffing lenders, contractors, and business partners in other projects. Quite a few banks—including Citigroup, Manufacturers Hanover (a predecessor of JPMorgan), the British lender NatWest, and of course Bankers Trust—had endured hundreds of millions of losses at the hands of Trump.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“Citigroup, Manufacturers Hanover (a predecessor of JPMorgan), the British lender NatWest, and of course Bankers Trust—had endured hundreds of millions of losses at the hands of Trump.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“One day in 1998, a real estate broker called Offit: “Would you make a loan to Donald Trump?” Trump at the time was a casino magnate known for his occasional showbiz hijinks and his on-and-off dealings with organized crime figures. He also was a deadbeat, having defaulted on loans to finance his Atlantic City casinos and stiffing lenders, contractors, and business partners in other projects. Quite a few banks—including”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“It dabbled in leveraged buyouts, the fad of the day, and then plowed into risky real estate lending, at one point making a $100 million loan to Donald Trump. The loan was unsecured: Bankers Trust had no claim to any collateral if Trump stopped paying the money back, which is exactly what he did. “We were brain dead when we made that loan,” Charles Sanford, the bank’s chairman, groaned in 1992. Before long, Bankers Trust moved on to derivatives.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers

“Trump, however, had no intention of repaying the loan on time. He asked his lawyers to figure out a work-around. One of them dissected each of the loan documents and, on a conference call with his colleagues to brainstorm how their client could wriggle out of his obligations, mentioned the existence of a so-called force majeure—act of God—provision in the loan agreement. That meant that in the event of an unanticipatable catastrophe, like a natural disaster, the contract wasn’t enforceable.”
― David Enrich, Dark Towers