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rffrydr
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 Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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The Madoff touch defiles Geneva:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20603037&sid=arXRFwcUvlZo
| Quote: | | “Geneva has to reinvent itself,” said Jacob Schmidt, chief executive officer of Schmidt Research Partners Ltd., a London-based hedge fund advisory firm. “The fall since 2007 is shocking.” |
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 11:33 am Post subject: |
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Lock down:
http://tinyurl.com/n2fckr
UBS has moved on to more "sandy" pastures.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2009 9:14 pm Post subject: |
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Swiss banks
Published: August 3 2009 14:49 | Last updated: August 3 2009 20:04
| Quote: | “Please leave the door ajar.” Swiss private bankers have long believed that bank secrecy is a fiction, albeit a useful one; the war against drugs and money laundering saw to that. Even so, UBS’s out-of-court settlement with the US has now broadcast the fact. The details of some 5,000 secret account holders will reportedly be handed over by the Swiss bank to the US tax authorities. UBS may also be fined – as much as SFr5bn. More important than the number of names or the size of any eventual fine, however, is the basis on which these tax evaders will be disclosed. That affects who might be handed over to other tax authorities in the future, and so the industry as a whole.
These parameters are already spelt out in a new double-taxation agreement with the US. Although its contents are not yet public, the Swiss parliament is expected to vote on the agreement early next year. It may then go to referendum. The parameters are likely to be demanding, as polls suggest that the Swiss support banking confidentiality; otherwise, the law could be publicly voted down. De jure the change to Swiss banking privacy may therefore be small. De facto, the perception among its clients may be otherwise.
This won’t spell the end of Swiss private banking. After all, more than half the industry’s new money comes from the developing world. Ukrainian oligarchs, say, bank in Geneva not because they want to escape high domestic tax rates, but because they value Swiss financial professionalism.
However, more than half the €1,700bn currently managed by Swiss private banks belongs to western accounts, where tax considerations may be important. It would only take a fraction of those funds to run scared for a lot of money to leave. |
The last refuge for our "internationally competitive industries who had just fled from the carribean. Protectionism under a masque. This will be somewhat offset by the new nationalism.
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:53 pm Post subject: |
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Swiss banks, once the model, have always been too big to fail:
Swiss banks
Published: June 19 2009 09:54 | Last updated: June 19 2009 19:31
| Quote: | Sadly, breaking up a bar of chocolate does not reduce the total number of calories. Still, Philipp Hildebrand, the next head of the Swiss central bank, seems to think that reducing the size of its large international banks – for which read UBS and Credit Suisse – might make them less risky. Ostensibly, Berne has reason to be concerned: last year, the assets of the two banks were six times Switzerland’s gross domestic product. Yet there is nothing new about the outsized scale of the financial services industry relative to the economy nor evidence that smaller banks can easily be allowed to fail.
As recently as the 1990s, when Swiss cantonal banks ran into difficulty, they had to be rescued by their bigger Swiss peers. Running UBS’s and Credit Suisse’s wealth, investment banking and domestic banking businesses as autonomous units with independent capital and risk-taking frameworks – rather than breaking up the banks outright – is a better solution.
Risk would be transferred mostly to the latter two, although that might erode the synergies the banks claim from cross-selling within their franchises. Yet Credit Suisse once operated as two groups, Credit Suisse and First Boston, and that did not work. The problem would in any case remain a Swiss one.
It is also hard to imagine the Swiss National Bank implementing a scheme that puts its two leading investment banks at such a competitive disadvantage. Switzerland is not alone in wanting to protect its financial services industry. A more rational view is that Mr Hildebrand’s comments, coming in the same week that the Bank of England warned of the dangers of allowing banks to become too big to fail, are aimed not at Credit Suisse and UBS but at regulators and governments overseeing large banks elsewhere.
Size is clouding the issue: bad managers and poor supervision are what allow bad banks to prosper. |
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 7:23 am Post subject: |
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Pulling out the heavy artillery. No longer about tax scofflaws or appeasing the French; now looks to reform one of our strangest expressions of industrial policy:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a4.7CIfqd5h0&refer=home
How to interpret this? Easy toss this into the rising tide of protectionism that comes naturally in any "Great Recessions." Won't be good for earnings in a globalized economy that is certain.
But this is no great "blow to capitalism as we know it" either. Its opposite in fact. The Bahamas et. al. had become the perverse expression of our "national champion." Codified in the negative by a Republican majority this structure was our answer to europe's and china's direct subsidies of global expansion. That it worked as an enormous plum for american entertainment industry and democratic funding stronghold made it all happen.
Labor is newly ascendant even as it dies.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 7:47 am Post subject: |
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Swiss bank UBS is fighting back against the Internal Revenue Service's attempts to have it divulge some 52,000 U.S. account holders by claiming the demand would violate Swiss privacy laws the Miami Herald reports. In a federal court brief filed yesterday in Miami, lawyers for the bank argued that, "the IRS now asks this court to force a Swiss financial institution and its employees, over the express objection of the Swiss government, to violate Swiss law by producing a massive quantity of confidential account information located exclusively in Switzerland." In February, the Justice Department sued UBS to gain access to these additional accounts having just settled a separate criminal probe with UBS where it agreed to turn over some 250 other account holders accused of avoiding paying U.S. taxes.
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri Apr 24, 2009 8:25 am Post subject: |
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Credit Suisse holds the fort:
http://tinyurl.com/ctds4t
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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rffrydr
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| Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2009 8:55 am Post subject: |
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Swiss Govt. buying of euros may do more to help E.Europe than anything EU can cobble together:
| Quote: | | Meanwhile, the FT is full of nonsense about "currency wars" following the SNB's action to intervene in EUR/CHF yesterday. Switzerland intervening to weaken its currency is one thing; Japan or another large, closed economy (China?) doign so is something else. After all, Switzerland doesn't face much competition for its cuckoo clock exports. Moreover, given the huge stock of CHF liabilities in Eastern Europe, one could argue that the SNB has now done more for Mrs. Gabor and Mr. Bukowski than the European Union ever has. CHF/HUF is now down 10% from its recent highs, which should take a bit of the sting out6 of the next mortgage payment. |
http://macro-man.blogspot.com/
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rffrydr
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