I'm struggling to wrap my head around the whole "balance sheet" thing. I actually had to bug Wolf Richter to explain it to me. I keep falling back to Piketty's statement that the best economy has capitalist participation and socialist regulation and the fact that this, really, is what overbearing central banks are all about. There's this central assumption that eventually "markets" will see through the smoke and mirrors and that the whole Jenga stack will come crashing down, but there's also this inability to see central market manipulation as anything but an epithet and a temporary injury before the Invisible Hand returns money to its rightful owners. I'm no longer sure that's the case, and I haven't seen anyone explain it in terms that make me feel they understand the problem. People point to China and say "it's a market economy for as long as the government wants it to be and no longer" and the Friedmanites point at the New Deal and say how it was socialism that prolonged the Depression... but I haven't seen anyone take the standpoint that maybe, just maybe, the central banks are bleeding out the markets like a stuck pig.
I would never pretend to be knowledgeable about balance sheets, generally. According to John Kay, most balance sheet reporting cancels out debits and credits on the same security (because apparently derivatives are traded back and forth so much so that if I owe you a dollar and you owe me a dollar on derivatives underlying the same source, we just call it an even zero). If you count all these phantoms, then DB's books show $55 TRILLION in total. Their actual deposits and loans are like $600 billion, which means that actual banking represents 1℅ of their overall business.