When the vampires start to donate blood, you know the whole system is dead. In a last minute maneuver announced this evening, an emergency rescue for Monte dei Paschi di Siena Bank (MPS) has been arranged, involving a consortium of banks and pension funds buying some $10 bil euro of non- performing debt off the bank’s books, at 30 cents on the dollar; and a capital infusion into MPS of some $5 billion. “Atlante” [sic] is the name for the new, rescuing entity, whose participants include Deutsche Bank—itself in need of rescue, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and others. The Italian Treasury Department issued a statement that it was ‘satisfied’ with the plan. The inference is that this maneuver from private sources avoids the imposition of the EU bail-in procedure.

This MPS so-called rescue was announced minutes before the results were issued from the ludicrous “stress tests” of 51 Euro banks, conducted by the European Banking Authority. In fact, no contrived stress exercises and scenarios of risk are needed to prove that the system itself is kaput in the Trans-Atlantic banking sector, with banks holding multi-hundreds of billions of non-performing debts, and trillions of worthless derivatives and other toxic claims. The stress test results came out only after 10 pm in Europe, after markets closed, so that financial players could have the weekend to figure out their next move!

All this highlights, that the only sane solution is that proposed earlier this month by Lyndon LaRouche, as the “Herrhausen” intervention, to deal with the crisis of Deutsche Bank, by providing an injection of liquidity, accompanied by transforming the bank’s mandate and activity, to supplying credit for productive use. This is spelled out in Helga Zepp LaRouche’s July 12 call, “Deutsche Bank Must Be Saved, for the Sake of World Peace!”

LaRouche stressed this earlier today, saying that this is the job we have to accomplish. Not “testing”—which is guaranteeing, not preventing the crash.

In the ongoing Deutsche Bank saga, its stock value had fallen 8 percent as of Friday morning, just since Wednesday. The price was hovering around 12 euros per share. Then by the evening, it blipped up a bit, after the MPS scheme was made known. This week Merrill-Lynch downgraded Deutsche Bank to “underforming” status.

one may assume that the assassination of Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen on Nov. 30, 1989, did not occur at the snap of a finger, but was planned and prepared over several weeks. The speech which Herrhausen was scheduled to give in New York on Dec. 4, “New Horizons in Europe,” with its straight challenge to destructive trans-Atlantic banking methods, was likely not known at the time the team of assassins went to work; however, two statements were known which Herrhausen gave in June and September, which contained the core components of what he would have said in New York, had he not been assassinated.

In an essay titled, “The Time Has Come — Debt Crisis at a Turning Point,” published by Germany’s leading business daily, Handelsblatt, on June 30, 1989, Herrhausen denounced the debt policies particularly of U.S. banks, as not working but only making the debtor nations’ situation worse as well as that of the creditor banks themselves. Instead, general debt write-offs of up to 70% including cuts in the interest paid of up to 50% for a period of 5 years, and the maturity of loans being extended to 25 or 30 years were the only things that would work, Herrhausen wrote. This approach, he insisted, would “enable the said (debtor) nations to reassign considerable resources that so far had been used to serve the debt, to instead be used such purposes that would serve the recovery of their domestic economies.” Herrhausen added that what debtor nations really needed was not fresh money, that is new debt, but “it would be better to say they need resources.” The net effect of this  “resources reallocation could during the first five years be bigger than the fresh money injections requested by them so far.” Herrhausen did not reference it directly, but what he proposed was the approach generally taken in the London Debt Agreement of 1953 that created an enormous relief for postwar Western Germany to get back on its feet and not collapse under the weight of the piled-up old debt. That Agreement had been negotiated by Deutsche Bank’s Hermann Josef Abs—the outstanding constructive banker who also played a role in promoting the Herrhausen’s career when he was still a young banker at the bank.

At a press conference Sept. 25, 1989, on the occasion of the World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C., Herrhausen presented the same arguments, pointing out that he very much hoped that other banks would follow the example of Deutsche Bank as a “debt reduction bank.” The unresolved payments problems of the debtor nations, along with problems resulting from debt imbalances in the United States itself and in Europe, Herrhausen warned, posed a systemic risk. Taken together with certain problems not solved in the Soviet Bloc even under the reforms of “Glasnost,” broad unrest, nationality frictions and “escalated conflicts erupting from that” could lead to very gloomy constellations, Herrhausen warned. He then proposed, for unstable Poland in particular, the creation of a special new bank in Warsaw, an “Agency for Reconstruction” which would make sure that new loans to the Polish economy would be used as the Marshall Plan money was used for well-defined  reconstruction in Germany and Europe after World War II.

With that, Herrhausen had addressed in his own words what Lyndon H. LaRouche had laid out in his own historic speech at the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin, on Oct. 12, 1988. That speech was being studied by many policymakers and bankers in the months following, and one may assume that Herrhausen had the text on his desk at some point as well.