Biography|Günther Bräunig — He Took This Bank After the First Subprime Collapse

IKB's headquarters on Wilhelm-Bötzkes-Straße looks like a quiet Mittelstand bank.

In the last week of July 2007 it was the first large German house the American subprime collapse reached.

On 30 July 2007 IKB cut its profit outlook and announced that Stefan Ortseifen had left as speaker of the board.

The same day the supervisory board appointed Günther Bräunig, already on the KfW Vorstand since 1 October 2006, as chairman.

Official biographies date his IKB chairmanship from 1 August 2007 to 31 October 2008.

His KfW board seat lay dormant for those fifteen months.

KfW, then IKB's largest shareholder at about 38 percent, took over an 8.1 billion euro liquidity line tied to IKB's Rhineland funding vehicle.

A wider bank consortium added further loss-sharing.

BaFin's then-president Jochen Sanio warned that an IKB failure could have been the worst German banking crisis since 1931.

This building, finished in 2000 for IKB in Düsseldorf-Golzheim, is where that rescue was run.

Bräunig was a crisis manager borrowed from the state development bank, not a career IKB man.

Dieter Glüder, also from KfW, joined the IKB board beside him.

On 1 November 2008 Hans Jörg Schüttler succeeded Bräunig after Lone Star bought KfW's remaining stake.

Bräunig went back to Palmengartenstraße.

The beige block is still IKB's registered seat at Wilhelm-Bötzkes-Straße 1.

Stand in front of it and the later KfW chairmanship reads as a second act, not a first.

He had already run a failing private bank from this doorway before he was asked to run the public one.

Photo: Dacse, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The 2021 view shows the Wilhelm-Bötzkes-Straße headquarters IKB has occupied since 2000.