Mr. Jain's spot to stay while in the states?

Deutsche Bank CEO Anshu Jain has played a central role in building the bank's investment banking business over the years, the arm that accounts for the lion's share of Deutsche's profits. So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Jain, who took over as Co-CEO of the bank with Jürgen Fitschen in May, decided to plunk some of his personal funds into the New York real estate market.

While $7.2 million—the amount Mr. Jain paid for the two-bedroom, 2.5-bath condo at 151 East 58th Street— might seem like a fortune to most of us, it's pretty much a pittance for the bank boss. And we're pretty sure it's a pied-a-terre as the Indian-born British citizen keeps a primary residence in London with his family and owns another place in Frankfurt. 

Mr. Jain couldn't have picked a better location for his New York pad; the condo's located at One Beacon Court, the same building where Bloomberg keeps its offices. In the new place, Mr. Jain can count on the hum of financial markets to lull him to sleep at night in the huge master bedroom with three (!) closets.

Located on the 33rd floor, the apartment is an excellent spot for a master of the universe to survey the city when he's in town. It has views stretching from the Hudson to the East River, according to the listing, held by Corcoran broker Barbara Russo. And the finishes, handpicked by designer Jacques Grange, aren't bad either.

Nor did Mr. Jain buy without negotiating a bargain: seller Francois Khawam, who bought the apartment for $4.42 million in 2005, tried to make a big profit when he listed the place for $8.4 million in April. Mr. Jain waited until the price dropped to $7.69 million before making his winning offer in September.

kvelsey@observer.com

The details of the case have been hard to figure from the start. Mr. Mulligan said cops kidnapped him to a cheap hotel and threatened to kill him if he left the premises, then beat him badly when they found he'd escaped. The police said Mr. Mulligan admitted to using marijuana and bath salts, then assumed a karate stance and charged officers.

Well, the details are still hard to figure, but The Los Angeles Times has a story that lends some credibility to the LAPD's claims. According to The Times, Mr. Mulligan walked into a police department headquarters in Glendale, Calif., and asked for help dealing with his substance use:"I know this is gonna sound crazy, but I feel like there are people following me. I feel like there was a chopper, do you hear a chopper?" Mr. Mulligan said on a recording made by Glendale police, adding that he'd snorted bath salts at least 20 times but, as of that day, had not used any for roughly two weeks.

"How long does this stuff stay in your … system, man, how's it legal!"

None of which explains why LAPD deposited Mr. Mulligan in a rundown motel room or felt compelled to beat him. But which may lend some support to the LAPD's story.

Bradley Birkenfeld, the former UBS banker who provided the Internal Revenue Service with evidence that the Swiss bank was helping U.S. citizens evade taxes, will receive $104 million in a whistleblower award. Mr. Birkenfeld, who said he once concealed diamonds in a toothpaste tube on behalf of a client, was released from prison on Aug. 1 after serving part of a 40-month sentence after confessing that he had forgotten to blow the whistle on himself.

Deutsche Bank is lagging behind its European peers when it comes to meeting new regulatory capital requirements, according to Bloomberg. The bank may cut jobs and reduce pay ratios under a restructuring plan announced this week.

A German court paved the way for the European Central Bank to begin a new program to buy sovereign debt, dismissing a lawsuit that sought to delay the plan.

Two-thirds of economists polled by Bloomberg think that the Federal Reserve will announce a new round of bond purchases tomorrow.

More details in the plea agreement signed by Peregrine Financial Group founder Russell Wasendorf Sr., who faces up to 50 years in prison under a deal with prosecutors.

Zuck spoke; Facebook shares rose.

Plaintiffs say that private equity firms including KKR, Silver Lake Partners and Bain Capital colluded to tamp down prices on buyout deals, according to a complaint filed in Massachusetts Federal District Court. The New York Times went to court to get the documents, which Bain lawyers worried would get washed into the election news cycle.

No one in France believes Bernard Arnault, the Louis Vuitton chief and the country's richest man, when he says he'll keep paying taxes in France once he's received Belgian nationality, according to The Financial Times. French president François Hollande has promised to tax income above 1 million euros at 75 percent.

Tadahiro Matsushita, the Japanese official leading a recent crackdown on insider trading, died yesterday in what police concluded was a suicide. Mr. Matsushita's investigation, which Bloomberg reports was not yet complete, led to the resignations of Nomura Holding's chief executive officer.

With the government reducing its stake in AIG, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Neil Barofsky had a telephone conversation about how taxpayers have fared in the bailout.

A German court will rule tomorrow on the legality of the European Central Bank's new bond-buying program.

With the ECB set to start buying sovereign debt, investors' bets on European bonds are looking pretty smart.

Deutsche Bank will cut costs by $5.8 billion in order to meet new regulatory capital requirements, the bank said.

Carl Icahn called the board of directors at Navistar International, the truck and diesel engine maker, a “poster child for abysmal business decisions and poor corporate governance.” Navistar answered that despite Mr. Icahn's “unproductive tactics of threats, attacks and disruption,” the board knows what it's doing.

Court bailiffs in Hong Kong evicted Occupy protestors from HSBC headquarters.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner finished ninth in the 50 to 54 age group at a recent triathlon.

There's a 4 percent chance Ron Paul is the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, according to Morgan Stanley (via Business Insider).

Canadian banks! Hiring amid cutbacks at financial firms elsewhere.

The board of the American Banking Association will vote tomorrow on a plan to create a nonprofit to donate to super-PACs and funnel funds into Senate races, according to Bloomberg. The funds could be used to support candidates who favor the repeal of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Business activity in the euro zone slowed at a faster rate in August, data show, in what The Wall Street Journal describes as one of the strongest signs yet that the region is heading into recession.

Also from The Journal, on the new math in Spain's education system: “We are mortgaging the future of generations of youth that now more than ever need education,” José Campos Trujillo, the secretary-general of the teacher federation of Spain’s largest union, wrote recently. “All the supposed savings in education are going to delay our exit from this crisis.”

The U.S. slipped to seventh place in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index.

Residential Capital, the mortgage unit of government-owned Ally Financial, will unload assets at auction next month as part of the home-lender's Chapter 11 process. Fortress Investment Group and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway are among the expected bidders.

Dutch financial firm ING Group plans to sell its stake in Capital One in a deal that may be worth $3 billion, The New York Times reports. ING acquired its 9 percent stake in the lender when Capital One bought ING's U.S. unit in February.

Deutsche Bank is said to cut 85 equities positions in Honk Kong and Tokyo, Bloomberg reports.

In spite of the billions in recent trading losses, JPMorganremains the best investment bank to work for, according to 3,500 executives surveyed by Vault.com.

One of the defendants, Peter Ghavami, a Belgian who had been head of an investment bank in Moscow, was arrested in December 2010 at Kennedy Airport. In the Libor case, a number of banks are outside the United States, so individuals who might be involved should be wary about traveling to this country because of the risk that they could be detained.

Two other points from Mr. Henning's take on the Deutsche case: Prosecutors can probably count on a 10-year statute of limitations in Libor cases, and if you even considered manipulating interbank lending rates while sitting near a computer, you probably committed wire fraud.

Mostly, though, consider a fake passport.

Photo of Brian Mulligan published yesterday by TMZ.

The LAPD never filed charges against Mr. Mulligan (another mystery), and for all the smoke coming off this story in the last ten days, Mr. Mulligan has yet to file the threatened $50 million lawsuit. According to the News, Mr. Flanagan is hoping that the L.A. city attorney will file charges against officers, providing richer access to police documents than are available to civil litigants. As Mr. Flanagan told the Associated Press, "As soon as we file a lawsuit, we can get depositions and find out what they did."

Last week, Citigroup chief executive officer went around telling everyone (read: The Financial Times and an audience in Singapore) that Citigroup didn't need to be broken up, as former Citi CEO Sandy Weill had argued last month. Mr. Pandit's media tour continued yesterday: Regulators telling banks which products they can sell undermines financial stability, somehow, he told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Occupy Central protesters in Hong Kong face a legal deadline to leave HSBC headquarters, where the group has been protesting for 10 months, according to Bloomberg.

London-based investment bankers would rather work in Singapore than London or New York, according to a survey conducted by recruitment firm Astbury Marsden; 60 percent of those surveyed expect the Asia-Pacific region to be the world's largest financial center in 10 years.

Some European bankers are being asked to watch what they say at the bar.

Spain is expected to tap about $75 billion in rescue funding, about 60 percent of the facility approved by European finance ministers last month, The New York Times reports.

Blackstone adds another name to its succession plan; CEO Steve Schwarzman still expected to "die at his desk."

The Times takes a closer look at Luis A. Aguilar, the SEC commission who scuttled the agency's attempts to impose new rules on money market funds.

Nomura is getting ready to slash jobs in equities and investment banking, according to Reuters.

Deutsche Bank introduced rules that allow it to claw back shares bestowed on employees in return for unvested stock awarded by their previous employer, the Financial Times reports. Other banks may follow suit.

A producer for The Wolf of Wall Street, which stars Leonard DiCaprio as a crooked stockbroker, is suing the film's production company for reducing her role behind the scenes, The New York Post reports.

Chinese investors are buying up Bordeaux vineyards.

The Standard Chartered exec who complained that "f---ing Americans" had no place telling the bank how to do business in Iran appears to be Richard Meddings, according to The New York Post.

We love it when the food fight between banks and politicians spills over to encompass...the entire cities of New York and London. Like when New York congressman Carolyn Maloney asked Jamie Dimon why JPMorgan executed trades that lost billions of dollars out of its London office. Why not New York? Or yesterday, when British lawmaker Mark Field painted reports of bad behavior at Standard Chartered as a battle in the war between the two cities. Reuters also heard complaints of anti-London bias in reference to the DFS order.

Two hedge funds are fighting a legal battle over whether they had a contract to trade $195 million in claims on Bernie Madoff's bankrupt firm. Solus Alternative Asset Management says it struck a deal with Perry Capital over telephone and instant messages; Perry says there never was a deal.

Hedge fund manager Doug Whitman, on trial for insider trading, told government witness Roomy Khan that he had no use for her if she wouldn't break the law, according to The Post. “You’re not going to be a slimeball, what do I want to talk to you for,” Whitman told Khan in a wiretapped conversation.

Knight Capital's privately-financed rescue deal was a bitter pill for investors looking for too-big-to-fail profits.

The Japanese units of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan were among banks to pledge improvements in guarding client information in the wake of insider trading investigations that have roiled Nomura Holdings and other Japanese financial institutions. Also in Japan, measures to clamp down on loan-sharking were seen tied to a reduction in suicide for "economic reasons." Now restrictions against non-bank lending may be pared back, and observers worry about the consequences.

Deutsche Bank's on-again off-again efforts to sell its real estate fund group, RREEF, is putting the business at a competitive disadvantage, investors and consultants tell The Wall Street Journal.

Muni-rigging trial: Three former UBS employees go on trial today on charges they fixed bids on municipal bond investment contracts. Three employees of GE Capital were convicted on similar charges in May, though those defendants have asked the trial judge to toss out that verdict; banks have paid more than $700 million to settle charges arising from the probe that lands the former UBS bankers in court today.

Rapid rise: Matt Zames, the JPMorgan executive elevated by CEO Jamie Dimon to staunch losses on positions amassed by the trader known as the London Whale, is a "mathematician and a poet," apparently. The 41-year-old graduate of MIT's Sloan School of Business took charge of the firm's chief investment office in May to wind down positions that led the bank to billions in losses. Last week, Mr. Zames was named co-chief operating officer, placing him in charge of more experienced executives such as chief financial officer Doug Braunstein and head of regulatory affairs Barry Zubrow.

Whither Europe: European Central Bank president Mario Draghi has gone on the offensive, first signaling that the ECB would not allow the euro to fail, then working to build consensus for a plan to ease the region's sovereign debt woes. Count Paul Krugman as among the doubters. CEOs in London for the Summer Olympics are privately voicing concern about the state of the British economy, according to The Financial Times.

Hard to do: Bank of American explored a possible breakup in 2010 and 2011, The Wall Street Journal reports, but decided against splitting off Merrill Lynch or Countrywide units.

Drink up: Funds that invest in tangible assets such as wine, art and classic cars are attracting investors amid fears that the world's currencies are unstable.

Not so fast: The Securities and Exchange Commission froze the accounts of traders who allegedly made $13 million illegally trading ahead of the Chinese offshore oil explorer Cnooc's $15 billion acquisition of Calgary-based Nexen last week.

Provisions: HSBC set aside $700 million to cover U.S. regulatory matters after the bank was scolded by Congress for lax anti-money laundering standards and amid ongoing inquiries into Libor-rigging at banks worldwide.