Surprise, surprise. Deutsche Bank has pulled off what seemed unthinkable days ago: a profit in its third quarter rather than a loss. This, though, was largely thanks to new accounting rules that relieved Germany’s largest bank from marking down some of its trading assets. By reclassifying almost €25bn of these loans, Deutsche pared the total writedown to €1.2bn. Cynics might call this legalised “smoke and mirrors” accounting. A more charitable view is that the European Union has belatedly remedied an accounting anomaly that destabilised banks by forcing them to mark down otherwise good assets.

In the new banking order, Deutsche is similar to Britain’s Barclays, which John Varley, chief executive, has saved from the UK government’s bail-out package. At Deutsche, Josef Ackermann has also avoided government assistance and is in no haste to raise capital after throwing just about everything into the coffers. In addition to the writedown relief, Deutsche has raised €2.2bn of equity to pay for almost 30 per cent of Postbank, and also reclassified over €1bn of tier two hybrid capital to secure a handsome tier one ratio of 10.3 per cent. Rather, the bank is in more of a hurry to shrink its balance sheet and lower its leverage ratio to a more market-friendly 30 times. So far, so good: it has declined to 34 times.