After the ECB concluded its latest annual stress test, which as expected found no problems with Europe's largest banks instead scapegoating Italy's well-known troubled banks in results that were widely discredited by the market, yesterday in an unexpected outcome, German economic research institute ZEW found that Germany's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, had the highest potential capital shortfall, as much as €19 billion in a study of 51 European banks using U.S. Federal Reserve stress test methods. The capital gap is greater than DB's entire market cap. 

Using the Fed's approach, and thus a far more credible approach than that proposed by the ECB, the 51 European banks showed a total capital shortfall of 123 billion euros, with the largest gaps at Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale (13 billion euros) and BNP Paribas (10 billion euros).