Laura Stevens and German Banking

Laura Stevens, of the Wall Street Journal

Ms. Stevens is fond of telling her coworkers at the Wall Street Journal that: "The only difference between a German banker and an armadillo is armadillos have better manners." 

When the Wall Street Journal sent her to Germany to cover the banking industry there, she initially thought it would be a tedious and unfulfilling assignment. After all, how exciting or controversial can a German bank be? They're full of money and have honest burghers guarding it carefully and prudently. It'll be about as exciting as a Buddenbrooks sequel. Nothing more.

She soon learned how wrong her initial reaction was! Her very first week in Dortmund found her chasing down the details of an old banking family that had siphoned off funds to start a cuckoo clock factory in Zhangdao, China, using recycled water bottles and cheap willow bark to produce knockoffs of Hermle and Junghans models for the Russian black market. Her investigation ruffled Teutonic feathers far and wide; she became the target of an online smear campaign that charged her, falsely, with putting ketchup on her sauerbraten. When that didn't deflect her reporting rampage, a contract was put out on her by the Schwarze Gauner -- and her life became worth less than a plugged pfennig. 

Ms. Stevens had no intention of backing down -- she loves a good challenge, whether it be with German mobsters or on a Norwegian slalom -- but her editors back in America had no use for her as a corpse riddled with bullets and feeding the fish in the Baltic, so they recalled her to report on the fracking industry.

Unfortunately the trans-Atlantic communication to her was garbled, and she thought she was being reassigned to report on the Swiss comedy team of Frick and Frack. She canvassed dozens of skating rinks in Chur and Zug for background on the skating duo, and returned to New York with a fascinating article on their exploits during the Second World War, when they smuggled hundreds of chinchillas out of Romania into Liechtenstein. 

Today Ms. Stevens makes her home in San Francisco, where she entertains guests at her condo under the Golden Gate Bridge by exhibiting her collection of Victorian beanbags. She also likes to cruise the Bay in her ketch, christened "Mambo Sauce to Go", which she built by hand entirely out of s'mores. 

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