Stocks rallied on a report that had been given from some source to the French wire service Agence France-Presse that Deutsche Bank was expecting to reach a settlement with the US Department of Justice of about $5.4 billion, considerably less than the $14 billion that the DoJ had been asking.

Favourable rumours notwithstanding, the US equity markets are surprisingly weak.

Their underpinnings bear little substance of firm and committed investment, which is a roundabout way of saying that they are in a bit of a bubble fueled by very short-term speculation and price manipulation.

Therefore, one might expect that just about any significant exogenous event is going to bring this market to its knees. A failure at Deutsche Bank would certainly do the trick. But there are a number of other things that would also do serious harm to a fragile market structure based on hot money and fraud.

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