On September 16th, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Justice wanted 14 billion dollars from Deutsche Bank to settle a case related to the mis-handling of mortgage-backed securities during the last financial crisis. As a result of that announcement, confidence in the bank has been greatly shaken, the stock price has fallen to record lows, and analysts are warning that Deutsche Bank may be facing a “liquidity event” unlike anything that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers back in 2008.

At one point on Friday, Deutsche Bank stock fell below the 10 euro mark for the first time ever before bouncing back a bit. A completely unverified rumor that was spreading on Twitter that claimed that Deutsche Bank would settle with the Department of Justice for only 5.4 billion dollars was the reason for the bounce. But the size of the fine is not really the issue now. Shares of Deutsche Bank have fallen by more than half so far in 2016, and this latest episode seems to have been the final straw for the deeply troubled financial institution. Old sources of liquidity are being cut off, and nobody wants to be the idiot that offers Deutsche Bank a new source of liquidity at this point.

As a result, Deutsche Bank is potentially facing a “liquidity event” on a scale that we have not seen since the financial crisis of 2008. The more the stock price drops, the faster other financial institutions, investors and regular banking clients are going to want to pull their money out of Deutsche Bank. And every time there is news about people pulling money out of the bank, that is just going to drive the stock price even lower. In other words, Deutsche Bank may be entering a death spiral that may be impossible to stop without a government bailout, and the German government has already stated that there will be no bailout for Deutsche Bank.

Banking customers have a total of approximately 566 billion euros deposited with the bank, and even if a small fraction of those clients start demanding their money back it is going to cause a major, major crunch.

It will be very interesting to see how desperate things become before the German government finally gives in to the pressure. The complete and total collapse of Deutsche Bank would be an event many times more significant for the global financial system than the collapse of Lehman Brothers was. Global leaders simply cannot afford for such a thing to happen, but without serious intervention it appears that is precisely where we are heading.

Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan denied any need to raise capital or ask for a bailout. That was followed by furious denials from Mario Draghi that the ECB’s low rates are partly responsible for Deutsche Bank’s current woes. Roughly half of all of Deutsche’s profits have traditionally come from loan interest; now, thanks to the madcap negative-interest-rate policies, that source of income is disappearing.

But the bank’s spectacular fall from grace — it has lost 90% of its market value since 2007 — is primarily owed to woeful, often criminal mismanagement - hence, all the fines. As the WSJ’s Paul J Davies writes: "The bank faces all the problems that plague its peers, but it has most of them worse than rivals. Its costs are among the highest, its balance sheet among the most bloated and its longer-term profitability one of the least attractive."

ALERT MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: PREVENTING STILL WORSE IN SYRIA

We write to alert you, as we did President George W Bush, six weeks before the attack on Iraq, that the consequences of limiting your circle of advisers to a small, relatively inexperienced coterie with a dubious record for wisdom can prove disastrous. Our concern this time regards Syria.

We are hoping that your President’s Daily Brief tomorrow will give appropriate attention to Saturday’s warning by Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova: “If the US launches a direct aggression against Damascus and the Syrian Army, it would cause a terrible, tectonic shift not only in the country, but in the entire region.”

Speaking on Russian TV, she warned of those whose “logic is ‘why do we need diplomacy’ … when there is power … and methods of resolving a problem by power. We already know this logic; there is nothing new about it. It usually ends with one thing – full-scale war.”

In the Washington Post, an abridged report of Zakharova’s remarks (nothing new about “full-scale war”) was buried in the last paragraph of an 11-paragraph article titled “Hospital in Aleppo is hit again by bombs.” Sunday’s New York Times totally ignored the Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s statements. In our view, it would be a huge mistake to allow your national security advisers to follow the example of the Post and Times in minimizing the importance of Zakharova’s remarks.

Last month, the US House of Representatives, following the lead of the Senate, passed a bill allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia over 9/11. When the bill made it to the President’s desk, however, Obama quickly showed his loyalty to Saudi Arabia and vetoed it. However, that was only the beginning of the rollercoaster.

Days after his despicable veto, the Senate stepped up and overwhelmingly voted to override it. The reason for the veto was obvious as this bill would, in theory, open up an avenue and allow lawsuits against the US for alleged sponsorship of terrorist activities in their own countries – a Pandora’s Box that President Obama, and the CIA most certainly do not want to open with the world watching. However, it appears, for now, that Pandora’s Box is open.

The lobbyist group Arab Project in Iraq now sees their opportunity to ask for compensation from the United States over violations by US forces following the invasion of Iraq that saw the toppling of late President Saddam Hussein in 2003, according to a report from Al-Arabiya News. The group is pushing for “a full-fledged investigation over the killing of civilian targets, loss of properties and individuals who suffered torture and other mistreatment at the hand of US forces.”

While many states have criticized JASTA for its potential of eroding the principle of sovereign immunity and changing international law, this immunity has been used by Saudi Arabia, who was found to have aided and abetted the 9/11 hijackers, to shield themselves from any and all accountability. Arab Project in Iraq is the first to take advantage of this bill against the US, but the implications for further accountability for unjust wars are only beginning to be realized.

Today’s mayhem is not so much the result of reckless bankers and asleep at the wheel regulators, but rather of the public policy response to the last crisis itself – that is to say, regulatory over-reach and central bank money printing. All eyes are naturally focused on the specific problems of Deutsche Bank, but Deutsche is in truth no more than the canary in the coal mine. As Tidjane Thiam, chief executive of Credit Suisse, observed last week, as an entire sector, European banks are still “not really investable”. Much the same disease as afflicts Continental banks also applies to British counterparts, including Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and even Lloyds.

All are fast being enveloped by a perfect storm of negatives, and this time around, it is substantially the policymakers and law enforcers who are to blame. It’s virtually impossible to make money out of banking in a zero interest rate environment, frustrating attempts to rebuild capital buffers after the bad debt write-downs of recent years. In circumstances where central banks have bought right along the yield curve, flattening it down to virtually nothing, the margin from maturity transformation all but disappears.

[Then] comes the apparently never ending misery of misconduct fines, which for the US seem to have become just another way of further taxing the banks, particularly the European ones, routinely threatened as they are with removal of their dollar clearing licences should they try to resist. Nine years after the event, there is still no let up. It’s a classic case of justice delayed being justice denied.

Despite the parallels, Deutsche is not Lehman’s in redux. If necessary, Angela Merkel will bail the bank out, politically embarrassing though it will be for her. Whatever the cost, Germany is more than solvent enough to take the hit. Unlike previous legs in Europe’s interminable banking crisis, there is no risk of fiscal contagion. What all this will do, however, is cause banks further to contract their balance sheets, perpetuating the wider economic impact of the crisis. It all goes to show that there is no mess quite so bad that government intervention to correct it won’t make even worse.

US authorities have demanded Germany's biggest lender pay a $14 billion (£10.5 billion) charge that is almost as much as Deutsche's entire value. The lender urgently needs to secure a substantially lower fine before the US presidential election to have any hope of restoring market confidence. The threat of the fine has pushed the bank's shares to record lows in recent weeks.

Officials at Deutsche are now racing to reach a settlement over the mis-selling mortgage-backed securities before America votes on its next president in November. It comes as German politicians accused the US of waging an "economic war" on the bank. German economy minister and vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel hit back at Deutsche Bank for telling employees his bank was suffering from market speculation.

"I didn't know whether I should laugh or be furious that a bank which turned speculation into a business model now declares itself the victim of speculators," he said on a plane to Iran, which he is visiting with a business delegation. A new presidency after the November 8 election is set to bring unknown risks and likely delays.

Guess who’s hosting it? Well, if you guess the campus’ Women’s Center then pat yourself on the back because you guessed right. What could go wrong, eh? In this 10 week festival fuelled by misandry, ‘male-identified’ students will be ‘shamed away from supposed male privileges, patriarchy and the language of dominance.’ How quaint.

Here it is straight from the morons’ mouths. Dipro Bhowmik, who sits on the leadership team, recently said the goal of the Duke Men’s Project is for male students to “critique and analyze their own masculinity and toxic masculinities to create healthier ones.”

Alex Bressler, another junior on the leadership team, said the program would help men “proactively deconstruct our masculinity.” This rank experiment in effeminization is patterned off of a similar goofy idea via the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where the poor dupes were shamed into contemplating ‘how masculinity plays a harmful influence in lives.’