May 2016: Will Deutsche Bank Survive This Wave Of Trouble Or Will It Be The Next Lehman Brothers?By Michael Snyder A month after admitting to rigging precious metals markets, Deutsche Bank has been hit with a double-whammy of more alleged fraudulent behavior today and the stock is sliding. First, Reuters reports that the bank took a charge of 450 million euros for equity trading fraud, and then Bloomberg reports that The SEC is looking into Deutsches post-crisis mortgage positions. This is a bank that is steadily bleeding money, and so the last thing that it needs is for government agencies to be putting immense pressure on it. Unfortunately for Deutsche Bank, the SECseems determined to kick it while it is down Troubled Wall Street giant Deutsche Bank is under another investigation, this time by the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the pricing and reporting of certain mortgage-backed securities. The SEC wants to know whether the Frankfurt, Germany-based bank artificially raised the value of mortgage-backed securities in 2013 and later hid those losses for an extended period of time, Bloomberg first reported, citing people familiar with the matter. At one point, it was estimated that Deutsche Bank had 64 trillion dollars worth of exposure to derivatives contracts. That is an amount of money that is approximately 16 times the size of the GDP of the entire nation of Germany. So nobody wants to see Deutsche Bank fail. It would be a financial disaster unlike anything the world has ever experienced before. But right now things are not looking good. As you can seefrom this chart, the steady decline of Deutsche Banks stock price is eerily similar to what happened to Lehman Brothers during the months leading up to the time when it finally completely collapsed Earlier this year, Deutsche Banks stock price set a new record low, and since that time it has been hovering just above that record low. Clearly it is no secret that Deutsche Bank is having big problems, and the outlook for the immediate future is not good. I included the following quote fromBerenberg analyst James Chappell in aprevious article, but I think that it bears repeating Too many problems still: The biggest problem is that DBK has too much leverage. On our measures, we believe DBK is still over 40x levered. DBK can either reduce assets or increase capital to rectify this. On the first path, the markets do not exist in the size nor pricing to enable it to follow this route. Going down the second path also seems impossible at the moment, as the profitability of the core business is under pressure. Seeking outside capital is also likely to be difficult as management would likely find it hard to offer any type of return on new capital invested. In the end, I believe that Deutsche Bank will ultimately implode, but it wont be the only one. Meanwhile, we just got some more very disturbing news out of Asia. According toBloomberg, Japanese exports have now fallen for seven months in a row Japans exports fell for a seventh consecutive month in April as the yen strengthened, underscoring the growing challenges to Prime Minister Shinzo Abes efforts to revive economic growth. Overseas shipments declined 10.1 percent in April from a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said on Monday. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 9.9 percent drop. Imports fell 23.3 percent, leaving a trade surplus of 823.5 billion yen ($7.5 billion), the highest since March 2010. When your imports are 23 percent lower than they were a year earlier, that is a clear sign that consumer demand is way, way down and that your economy is in the process of imploding. So I will repeat what I have said a number of times before Watch Germany and watch Japan. I believe that they are going to be two of the biggest stories as this new global financial crisis begins to play out. *About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michaels controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled The Rapture Verdict is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.* No doubt a tax payer bail out will soon be forth coming. 