The current New Yorker has an exposé of how Deutsche Bank earned a small commission for executing "mirror" buy and sell orders that seemed to leave their wealthy Russian clients roughly where they began. "To inspect the trades individually, however, was like standing too close to an Impressionist painting — you saw the brushstrokes and missed the lilies," the article notes. "These transactions had an alchemical purpose: to turn roubles that were stuck in Russia into dollars stashed outside Russia". The US$10 billion that's been expatriated has anti-money laundering regulators interested, and DB is floundering. Chinese commercial banks have taken steps to improve oversight of their bills of exchange business, following a string of thefts and unauthorised printing of the short-term financing instruments, which are often used to guarantee payments by small businesses to their creditors. The Chinese online news service Caixin reports that two employees at the Beijing branch of the Agricultural Bank of China stole 3.9 billion yuan (US$585.6 million) worth of bills from a safe and replaced them with a stack of paper wrapped in newspaper in January. When this became known, other banks started storing the bills in clear plastic bags.