Swiss Bank executives: Deep kim chee time?

Switzerland’s private banks have started to ban their top executives from travelling abroad, even to neighbouring France and Germany, because of fears they will be detained as part of a global crackdown on bank secrecy.

The head of one leading private bank in Geneva said the growing determination of countries such as the US and Germany to tackle tax evasion and secrecy meant banks felt they had to take extra measures to protect employees.

I have had mixed beliefs about Swiss et al bank secrecy. Originally I thought of it as a great place for decent people to protect themselves against kleptocratic thugs. Then all too often it was the place of choice for the kleptocratic thugs themselves to protect their stolen money from decent people. Now I swing back to the former.

From their discreet offices on a luxury goods shopping street overlooking Lac Leman, private bankers in Geneva reacted this week with a mixture of intense anger, at what they see as an unjustified attack by big countries, and concern about the threat to their business model.

“It is not really about bank secrecy; it is about solving an internal problem [for the big countries] by finding an enemy outside to bash,” said one senior banker.

That and the fact that a lot of people seem to think that tax rates are high enough to justify committing felonies to evade those taxes. That is a very destructive place for a society to put itself. Richard Milne has the story in the Financial Times.