NFL viewership is in free-fall collapse and with good reason. If people are waking up, some of them may know that one of Europe’s largest banks is also collapsing. Deutsche bank is going under. This could have a dramatic effect on the EU and America also.

The 2015 annual report for Deutsche Bank runs to some 448 pages, so one rather doubts if even its CEO, John Cryan, has read it all, or has a complete grasp of, for example, its €42 trillion in total notional derivatives exposure.

Is Deutsche Bank technically insolvent? We’d suggest that it probably is, but we have no dog in the fight, having never either owned banks or shorted them. And like everybody else we assume that some kind of fix will soon be in – probably one that will further vindicate exposure to gold, both as money substitute and currency substitute. Professor Kevin Dowd, asking whether Deutsche Bank ist kaputt, suggests that the bank’s derivatives exposure is difficult to assess rationally; the value of its derivatives book

“is unreliable because many of its derivatives are valued using unreliable methods. Like many banks, Deutsche uses a three-level hierarchy to report the fair values of its assets. The most reliable, Level 1, applies to traded assets and fair-values them at their market prices. Level 2 assets (such as mortgage-backed securities) are not traded on open markets and are fair-valued using models calibrated to observable inputs such as other market prices. The murkiest, Level 3, applies to the most esoteric instruments (such as the more complex/illiquid Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations) that are fair-valued using models not calibrated to market data – in practice, mark-to- myth. The scope for error and abuse is too obvious to need spelling out.”

42 Trillion Euros equals 47 Trillion Dollars. If that number is unreliable it still suggests a huge problem. And it’s one that your taxes will likely be called on to fix.

Speaking of theft … taxes, Apple is the biggest U.S. tax dodger (not Donald Trump). The software/SJW giant avoided paying $65 Billion in taxes for either the current year or last year. What a shame. That’s money that could have gone into the pockets of German speculators. We’ll just have to print money to cover for them.

In totally unrelated but much happier news Stephan Pastis will have a new compilation book out in November, Stephan’s Web:

Pastis / McMeel Publishing.

It’s like Charlotte’s Web but sarcastically and self-deprecatingly humorous. Unlike Deutsch and Apple, it has real value.