
Gambled Away in the Financial Crisis: The Deutsche Bank Story
Deutsche Bank spent the 2000s chasing Wall Street, and this DW film traces how that ambition helped detonate the 2007/2008 financial crisis. Once the flagship of the German economy, the bank handed its investment division free rein in pursuit of global-player status, loading itself with risk while regulators looked away. The film lays out the fallout in hard numbers: tens of billions of euros in penalties paid to supervisory authorities, a share price that has fallen from around 60 euros two decades ago to roughly 10 euros today, and shareholders and ordinary customers left holding the losses. Interviews and financial reporting reconstruct how bonus structures rewarded short-term risk-taking year after year, insulating the traders and executives responsible even as the institution's reputation collapsed around them. The documentary keeps its focus on accountability, asking who actually paid for the greed and who simply cashed out, and finds that the people who built the crisis were, almost without exception, the ones who profited most from it.