In this detailed, thoroughly researched, and highly readable survey of the Deutsche Bank's business dealings in and with the United States since the bank's foundation in 1870, Kobrak relates a story beset by vicissitudes, risk taking, reverses, and political upheavals that characterized the Deutsche Bank's involvement in the ever changing political and economic framework of the American market. The author, who teaches corporate finance and business history at the European School of Management in Paris, is an internationally known business historian who has other major works to his credit; the German edition of the present book appeared only months after its original publication in English. For his primary research, Kobrak has perused masses of documents, mostly from the Deutsche Bank's own collection on its North American business between 1870 and 1941; for the post-1945 period, he relies mainly on the literary bequest of Hermann Josef Abs, a key figure in the bank's postwar history, and on oral history accounts and newspaper articles. Other archival collections used include those of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; the New York Federal Reserve Bank; and the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt.

The book spans several epochs in the history of modern banking: when Kobrak's story begins, neither telephone nor direct telex lines existed between Germany and the United States, so that news of an American bankruptcy might take weeks to reach Germany; when it ends, transmittal of news and transfers of money had become virtually instantaneous. Though still ranked (by some measures) among the top ten international banks today, Deutsche Bank has lost some of the influence in world financial markets it once had; and domestically the value of its equity has slipped from a sum corresponding to about one percent of Germany's gross domestic product (GDP) in 1913 to one totaling only a third of one percent in 2005 (pp. 19, 389). Despite its wide-ranging international activities, no other country in the world played a greater role in Deutsche Bank's history than the United States, apart from Germany itself, and the bank served as the most important German financial institutional connection to the United States during most of the period under review. By 2002, about a quarter of its assets and total revenue came from North America (p. 14). And this despite the fact that “during many years of this narrative, Deutsche Bank was not in the United States in any meaningful sense” (p. 3), that is, the bank did a good deal of business with American institutions and individuals, without operating a subsidiary or branch in the U.S.

Most important, perhaps, was the bank's involvement with a number of railroad lines, in particular the Northern Pacific Railway. Between 1876 and 1890, Bismarck's nationalization policy had put nearly three billion marks in the hands of companies and individuals who had held railroad securities (p. 104) at a time when America was in search of foreign capital to fund the staggering growth in tracks. By 1890, there were nearly 163,000 miles of track, more than in all of Europe, and the controlling interest in many U.S. railroads was held outside the United States. Especially during the last decades of the nineteenth century, foreigners had sizable holdings in the larger railroad companies. The Deutsche Bank's involvement with the Northern Pacific Railroad since 1883 was in part based on the personal relationship between Georg von Siemens, spokesman of the bank's management board and an enthusiastic promoter of U.S. investment, and Henry Villard, a German expatriate, who was closely associated with both Northern Pacific Railroad and Deutsche Bank, and whose charisma, clever publicity schemes, and grand vision were not always matched by his integrity. Kobrak paints a differentiated and perhaps more favorable picture of Villard than Lothar Gall (in Gall et al., The Deutsche Bank, London, 1995), emphasizing his grand vision and faith in his own dreams which, however, given plummeting revenues and the company's falling into bankruptcy, cost some German investors dearly. When he finally realized the truth with the clarity of a man too long deceived, Siemens, bitterly disappointed in Villard, used a large part of his own private fortune to recompense investors who had bought the company's stock on his advice. Despite unedifying experiences in connection with the Northern Pacific Railroad, the bank continued investing in other railroad companies.

Possibly the greatest challenge for Deutsche Bank in tapping into early opportunities in the United States was the absence of adequate financial regulation. As Kobrak stresses time and again, at the turn of the twentieth century the American financial system was fragile. Corporate law was fragmented, accounting standards and reporting inconsistent, and effective control inhibited by poor regulation. Though Germany itself was not immune to financial crisis, since the 1873 depression the country had put many institutional safeguards against outright panic into place, while the United States failed to create extensive regulation for its capital markets until the New Deal. The United States also had no central bank until 1913, unlike Germany (1876) and France (1800). It was thus easier for Deutsche Bank to market American securities in Europe than European ones in the United States.

With the onset of World War I, governments and politics began to play a far greater role in economic life. The war and its aftermath also destroyed some of the personal relations between German and American bankers. After the war, Germany seemed to devolve from a disciplined lender to an undisciplined debtor. Whereas Deutsche Bank's main concern before 1914 had been to find suitable investments for its German clients, after the war it shifted to encouraging American investments in Germany. In the space of a decade, German businessmen were transformed from welcome foreign investors to holders of enemy assets. As Kobrak relates, America seized more foreign assets than any country in history, and during the interwar years Deutsche Bank's affairs in the U.S. were dominated by its efforts to get those assets back. By the time Hitler came to power, Deutsche Bank's stock price had fallen to about one-quarter of what it had been in the 1920s. The reader will not find a great deal about the bank's involvement with National Socialism—this, as Kobrak points out, has been ably discussed in Harold James's books on the subject—since the regime's policy of autarky and control of external capital flows significantly curtailed international banking. Given the Allied occupiers' suspicion of Germany's large banking conglomerates, Deutsche Bank was initially split into several entities after World War II, and not reunited until 1957.

Throughout his analysis, the author provides a great deal of interesting political and financial context to put business history into perspective; fascinating details on American banks and personal contacts between German bankers and the great American banking houses of J. P. Morgan, Anthony Drexel, Speyer, and others add color to his analysis. Banking on Global Markets is not only a first-rate scholarly monograph, but also a consistently absorbing history of a European bank's involvement in the ever-changing American market that will not fail to engage even the more general reader.