While creating and selling mortgage-based securities to some of its clients, Deutsche Bank AG was not only advising other clients to bet the other way, but also sometimes doing it itself, according to the Wall Street Journal. A trader at the bank would help create an index that made it easy for the bank to bet against housing even as sales people at the bank were selling the securities as if there were no downside to the American housing market. Then some of the tax-payer money was paid by the US Government to AIG to reimburse Deutsche’s hedge-fund clients who had bought the mortgage securities. American regulators looked at whether there were misrepresentations made to the hedge fund managers who bought the mortgage-backed securities even as Deutsche Bank was betting against the housing market.
