IN ENGLISH for those among us who don't speak finance:

Deutsche Bank, a large multinational that has been in a great deal of trouble, is being fined fourteen billion dollars (more than the GDP of El Salvador as Quartz so colorfully puts it) for being shady as fuck in their dealings around mortgage-backed securities, a variety of "valueless thing banks sell for shit-tons of money" that tanked the economy in 2007 a la The Big Short.

Deutsche Bank, which has already paid out some $11b in fines, doesn't have that kind of money. Their balance sheet says they have about $5.5b to pay fines. BNP Parabas, another big-ass bank, has an analytical department that figures DB only set aside about $2b to deal with these particular fines, which makes things more exciting.

A lot of DB's money is tied up in CoCo Bonds, which pay a great yield because they transfer a lot of risk to the bond-holder. In short, the bank is borrowing your money and paying a really great rate of interest because if they get in trouble, you no longer own a loan, you own stock in a failing bank.

Right now, those bonds are trading like shit because the market sees this as a sign that those bonds are about to hand grenade themselves into nothing.

Devil's Advocacy: Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism thinks this is all theatre:

And as we’ve shown, on every past mortgage settlement, there’s been a huge gap between the nominal settlement amount and the real economic cost to the perp. Any part of the settlement that is not a hard dollar fine or restitution should be treated with considerable skepticism. These pacts are larded up with undertakings like “give away a certain dollar amount of foreclosed properties” or “make a certain amount of mortgage modifications” that are set in such as way as to either cost the bank very little (or even impose costs on third parties) or amount to giving the bank credit for things they were going to do in any event. So the gap between $14 billion and $3 billion is far smaller than it appears. Expect as before for the government to get close to its asking number. If this settlement departs from precedent and Deutsche ponies up the overwhelming majority in hard dollars, it would confirm suspicions that the US is far more willing to play hardball with foreign banks than native sons. Barclays, Credit Suisse, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland are still on the hot seat and could face similar rough (as in fully deserved) treatment.

...but it does reflect one of the recurrent themes of finance in 2016, namely that the US is fully willing to fuck over foreign institutions in the name of the USA.