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Warning signals about the Swiss system have been flashing on and off for several years. In 1970 the Basel branch of the United California Bank went broke after losing $50 million in cocoa futures trading. Around the same time came the collapse of Bernard Cornfeld's Geneva-based Investors Overseas Services empire, built with the assistance of Switzerland's loose banking laws -and in part with that of the banks themselves. In 1974 the Union Bank of Switzerland lost $56 million in foreign-exchange speculations, and the Lugano branch of Britain's Lloyd's Bank dropped...
Erdman comes to his subject with the sure hand of one who knows, from the inside, what lurks in the hearts of financial razzle-dazzle artists. A graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign service, he picked up a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Basel in 1957, then landed a job doing long-range forecasting for the Stanford Research Institute. Later he became a V.P. for a Bermuda-based investment company, then a co-founder of a small Swiss bank. The bank flourished, was subsequently bought out by United California Bank, and Erdman found himself wheeling...
Financial Flicks. Erdman's cell was comfortable enough: a room in a former Basel monastery where the authorities allowed him .to order dinner and wines sent in from nearby restaurants. But, not knowing how long he would stay, Erdman started writing a novel about gold speculators. Says he: "I had just come off the excitement of international banking and I was full of theories. Primarily, I was convinced the world was facing the first cataclysmic financial events since World War II, a massive increase in the price of gold and devaluation of the dollar." The book, The Billion Dollar...
...that, some Western financiers in recent weeks have begun to express discreet concern about Comecon's mounting pile of debt. The Basel-based Bank for International Settlements has noted that the ratio of debts to exports -which determines a country's ability to repay loans-has reached a high level in some Communist countries. Bank of America, Citibank, Chase Manhattan and Manufacturers Hanover all conspicuously took no part in a recent $250 million loan to the Soviet Union's Foreign Trade Bank. Some Western banks are also trying to raise interest rates charged to Communist borrowers. They...
When he died of bronchitis in Basel last month at the age of 85, Mark Tobey had long been the favorite American painter of those who, in general, disliked American art. For them, Tobey was the quintessential expatriate: an old man of august refinement and blunt disposition who had settled in Switzerland 15 years before and proved his vision by amplifying it far from his roots on the Seattle coast...