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forty years we didn’t lose a penny on anything with a triple-A rating,” he says. “We stopped building the portfolio in subprime in 2006. I had the idea that there was something wrong with your market. I did not have the idea that your market would completely collapse.” He pauses. “It has told something to me. I was in the belief that the best supervised of all banking systems was in New York. To me the Fed and the SEC were second to none. I did not believe that there would be e-mail traffic between investment bankers saying that they were selling . . .” He pauses again, and decides he shouldn’t say “shit.” “Dirt,” he says. “This is by far my biggest professional disappointment. I was in a much too positive way U.S.-biased. I had a set of beliefs about U.S. values.”

The global financial system may exist to bring borrowers and lenders together, but, over the past few decades, it has become something else, too: a tool for maximizing the number of encounters between the strong and the weak, so that the one might exploit the other. Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets. During the boom years a wildly disproportionate number of those idiots were in Germany. As a reporter for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt named Aaron Kirchfeld put it to me, “You’d talk to a New York investment banker and they’d say, ‘No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!’” When Morgan Stanley designed extremely complicated credit default swaps so they were all but certain to fail, so that their own proprietary traders could bet against them, the buyer was German. When Goldman Sachs helped the New York hedge fund manager John Paulson design a bond to bet against—a bond that Paulson hoped would fail—the buyer on the other side was a German bank called IKB. IKB, along with another famous fool at the Wall Street poker table called WestLB, was based in Düsseldorf—which is why, when you asked a smart Wall Street subprime mortgage bond trader circa June 2007 who was still buying his crap, he could say, simply, “Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf.”

THE DRIVE FROM Berlin to Düsseldorf takes longer than it should. For long stretches the highway is choked with cars and trucks. A German traffic jam is a peculiar sight: no one honks, no one switches lanes searching for some small, illusory advantage, all trucks remain in the right-hand lane, where they are required to be. The spectacle of sparkling BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in the left lane and immaculate trucks in a neat row in the right lane is almost a pleasure to watch. Because everyone in the jam obeys the rules, and believes that everyone else will obey them, too, the cars and trucks move as fast as they can, given the circumstances. But the pretty young German woman behind the wheel of our car doesn’t take any pleasure in it. Charlotte huffs and groans at the sight of brake lights stretching into the distance. “It’s what I hate more than anything in the world,” she says apologetically. “I hate being stuck in traffic.”

She pulls from her bag the German translation of Alan Dundes’s book. I’d asked her about the title. There is a common German expression, she explains, that translates directly as “lick my ass.” To this hearty salutation the common German reply is, “You lick mine first.” The German version of Dundes is called You Lick Mine First. “Everyone will understand this title,” she says. “But this book, I don’t know about this.”

The last time I’d been in Germany for more than a few days was when I was seventeen years old. I’d traveled across the country with two friends, a bike, and a German phrase book. In my head was a German love song taught to me by an American woman of German descent. So few people spoke English that it was better to assume they did not and deploy whatever German came to hand—which usually meant the love song. And so I assumed on this trip I would need an interpreter. I didn’t appreciate