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The acquisitions “struck me as not being in the character of Deutsche Bank,” says Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, managing principal at capital markets consultancy MRV Associates. Valladares, who worked as an equity analyst at Bankers Trust around the time of the Deutsche Bank acquisition, described Bankers’ culture as one where “traders would have sold their grandmothers three times for a profit.” “It was a very aggressive transaction, and the culture of Deutsche Bank has been so different since,” she says. Expansion brought with it “an increase in operational risk exposure,” as well as a deal-chasing culture in which “internal controls start to loosen” and bankers “cut corners in terms of their due diligence,” Valladares notes. (Deutsche Bank did not return a request for comment for this article.)

“It tells you that there’s a lot of demand for these [leveraged] loans and it means that people in the whole lending chain are moving about too quickly,” said Mayra Rodríguez Valladares, a financial regulations consultant. “That exposes you to a lot of operational risk, with more errors made by people in the chain.”

That kind of expansion can come with risks. Mayra Rodriguez Valladares at financial consulting firm MRV Associates said Deutsche Bank expanded too quickly, putting a strain on oversight and making the bank more prone to high-profile scandals. “Some of the professionals there have been involved in LIBOR manipulations, foreign exchange manipulations, money launderingscandals,” Valladares said.

Mayra Rodriguez Valladares of MRV Associates thinks the SEC should step in,directing publicly traded companies to disclose their CLO holdings.  

“These two deals are examples of investors seeing that we are late in the credit cycle and it is high time to compel lenders to put covenants in place that will protect lenders,” Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, a banking and capital markets consultant said.

If you’re open to spanning the globe, “The bond portfolio should be diversified from a sector, geographic, and maturity perspective,” says Mayra Rodriguez Valladares, managing principal at MRV Associates, and a bank regulatory and capital markets consultant based in New York City. Specifically, “It should contain a variety of foreign sovereign, corporate, and municipal bonds as well as domestic ones in those categories,” Rodriguez Valladares says. “I also think it’s important to invest in bonds from multilateral issuers such as the Inter-American Development Bank [focused on Latin America and the Caribbean] or World Bank. They’re almost always rated AAA.”