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carsongross

The swiss are an inspiration.

I hope that the swiss spirit is not submerged in the ever-rising tide of internationalism.

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I think the opposite. I want an end to nationalities.

Why would you want such thing?

Because it serves no purpose but strife, hatred and intolerance of other human beings?

And how would doing such thing stop those who hate and are intolerant?

It would reduce the justifications such people have for their heinous activities.

Those things existed before and without nations. Civil wars happen despite the participants being of the same nationality. A country is (usually) simply a label for a group of people with a shared culture, language, mindset, etc. Removing those labels is a naive attempt at achieving some global utopia filled with uniform drones.

Do you think there would be less conflict in the Middle East if everyone had the same (lack of) nationality? Unless you are willing to engage in mass genocide, eugenics and eternal subjugation to achieve your world of peace, there is little you can do about people that look like each other and live close to each other from identifying as a single unit. The idea of social constructivism has deluded people into believing that any human problem can be fixed by removing words from the dictionary. It's absurd.

Swiss bank secrecy is in part what allows criminals and dictators around the world to ruin and enslave entire nations for money.

Is that still the case? I thought Swiss secrecy isn't what it used to be.

Anyway, some people would argue that strong privacy protections are a good thing even if they help bad guys.

Don't you think they can just wipe the slate clean of decades of money laundering with zero consequences? What about millions of lives that were lost/affected by this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money...

What about the people who actually did it or allowed it in those countries? Aren't they the ones to blame?

According to Swiss bankers, thanks to the FATCA agreement, the best place to do shady banking these days is… the US (specifically Delaware).

You could make the same invalid argument for encryption.

No you can't, encryption doesn't have awareness or morals.

The Swiss made their fortune on the misfortune of others from Nazi gold to modern dictators they have an entire industry around cleaning effectively blood money.

> You could make the same invalid argument for encryption.

You could make the same invalid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H argument for encryption.

FTFY

As someone who has worked at a Swiss bank: This might have applied a couple of decades ago. Especially in the last decade, Swiss banks introduced rules to overcome this problem with international customers. Smaller banks started to turn down US customers right away (like the one I worked at). It has become dangerous for bank employees and banks themselves to support criminals like you mention. There is zero tolerance for money laundering. While it is far from perfect, the financial sector has matured in that regard.

To my knowledge, these rules came from intense diplomatic pressure from the US, not from some internal realization that it wasn't ethical. I wouldn't be at all shocked if subtler approaches to dealing with tainted money have been adopted.

Yeah, and now US banks and Delaware-based entities are in the same business … cui bono?

What about all the damage that has been done?

Indian politicians used it for decades to hide their money

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_black_money#Black_money...

Did you even read the linked paragraph? The story has been debunked and the cited bank is HSBC. Not really what I would call a swiss bank...

I did, did you?

denial != debunking

> it can be seen that bank deposits of Indians in Swiss banks have decreased from ` 23,373 crore in year 2006 to ` 9,295 crore in year 2010.

> the share of Indians in the total bank deposits of citizens of all countries in Swiss banks has reduced from 0.29 per cent in 2006 to 0.13 per cent in 2010.

You think they not culpable for the past because money got move around? Or that they are not guilty because the numbers are not astronomical.

Why do you think India is bent on AEOI with the swiss. Just to spite them?

As you say, it's far harder for Americans to get regular consumer bank accounts at big Swiss banks than it used to be.

On the other hand, it's hard not to see at least some banks as (still) having a culture of helping foreign customers evade their governments. E.g. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/herve-falcianis...:

"Birkenfeld himself had provided a variety of “concierge” tax-evasion services: he once bought diamonds for an American client, then smuggled them into the U.S. inside a toothpaste tube.

"A 2014 U.S. Senate report describes a Credit Suisse banker travelling to America to meet a client for breakfast at a Mandarin Oriental hotel, and passing along an issue of Sports Illustrated in which account statements were concealed between the pages."

And taking over the torch of tax evasion/financial privacy (two sides of the same coin?) is Bitcoin etc.

Who needs a bank in Switzerland when you can just have a 50 character long private key?

In fact bitcoin makes it harder to conceal transactions from your peers. Wallets are pseudonymous and can be correlated to IRL identities if used similarly to traditional banking accounts/physical wallets. Just because you can't correlate identities doesn't mean you should expect the network to guard your "financial privacy".

I might have worked for the largest Swiss bank and was responsible for the software that ran their Financial Investigation Unit. This entire department had the mandate to investigate large deposits and accounts to ensure that there was no link to nefarious sources. The reasoning was that they would rather not have the income than be linked to any "criminal or dictator".

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, and it definitely did happen, but Switzerland is no longer the place where dark money is hidden -- that's moved on.

There are two side of that coin - take WW2 for example - some Swiss banks catered to Germany helping expropriate and conceal their loot, while others played a role in safeguarding assets from illegal/immoral expropriation...in a sense you can't have one without the other...

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