Calling Wall Street’s banks stupid and dangerous is like calling the sun “big and warm.” It’s a clear understatement of an obvious fact. The same goes for calling Japan and China economically clueless. Their actions pretty much guarantee that they’ll soon enter some sort of death spiral.

Germany, meanwhile, is many things, but clueless and stupid aren’t normally on the list. So why is that country’s biggest bank causing nightmares for global policy makers and investors? Because – in a sign of just how close we are to the end of the fiat currency/fractional reserve banking era – Deutsche Bank is behaving in ways that would make executives at Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns step back in alarm. It seems, for example, to have become a derivatives junkie. Like a Vegas high-roller who can’t stop raising his bets, the bank’s exposure to this unregulated, largely off-balance-sheet market now exceeds not just its host country’s GDP, but that of its entire continent:

And it recently joined its Wall Street cousins-in-crime by attracting a $14 billion fine for mortgage fraud. This amount seems puny next to a trillions-with-a-T derivatives book, but it’s enough to force DB to raise capital at an extremely inauspicious time. Here’s an excerpt from a Bloomberg article on the bank’s — and Germany’s — plight:

Berlin is trying to distance itself from Deutsche Bank and the threat of a $14 billion U.S. fine that would likely force the bank to raise capital.

This last sentence illustrates the severity of the problem: When a government has to deny its intention to bail out a bank, a bail-out is not just possible but highly likely.

Zero Hedge has had some fun over the past year with a chart comparing DB’s share price with that of Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street bank that eventually collapsed, setting off the 2008-2009 conflagration. Here’s the chart from this summer:

And here it is after the most recent set of horrendous headlines:

DB’s saga seems to be nearing some kind of resolution, with exactly zero potential happy endings. Either it crashes, taking the European and maybe global financial system down with it, or Germany nationalizes it, potentially tipping the euro, dollar and yen into chaos.

Germany at the center of a global crisis, who would’ve thought it?