August 3, 2007 (LPAC)--IKB stocks lost 40 percent in Frankfurt trading yesterday, before a series of "institutional interventions" reduced the losses to 28 percent at the end of the trading.

Whether the bank will survive is in question. Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau already warned preemptively that its own estimate that IKB will end up losing 3.5 billion euros, is "a figure that may have to be corrected considerably downwards, but also considerably upwards."

Two different variants are offered by the German press on the chronology of the acute IKB crisis: 1) one group of the press, led by the Financial Times, claims that the first alarm bell on IKB was sounded by Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank, who called up Jochen Sanio of the BAFIN last Friday, setting into motion a whole series of crisis emergency telephone conferences on Saturday and Sunday; 2) the other group, led by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, says that it was the SEC that was alerted on the US end of things, and called the BAFIN first.

Both variants may contain part of the truth: the story about Ackermann at least confirms that Deutsche Bank panicked first, which may have a lot to do with its exposure in the Bear Stearns case. The story about the SEC may also be true, because it is from there, that already on Friday, the BAFIN started doing emergency telephone interviews with 20 select German banks and funds.