Word: switzerland
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...dramatic federal investigation of Switzerland's UBS has blown the lid off bank secrecy - and revealed how Swiss banks abet tax evasion on a far more widespread, if more banal, level. Over the past two decades, these secret banking services have been peddled progressively downmarket - first to the lesser-known fabulously wealthy, then to just the wealthy; more recently, private bankers have been tripping over themselves soliciting business from doctors, lawyers and other folks who are what the biz generally calls "high net worth" individuals. "The IRS has been concerned for decades that a combination of a global economy...
...capital inflows propping up its currency (the Swiss franc), making imported goods relatively cheaper. That's why maintaining bank secrecy has effectively been national policy for decades. As a Senate investigator, Blum got a taste of that when he tried to question a European representative for American companies in Switzerland who was suspected of commercial bribery. "I was personally warned by the Swiss ambassador that if I tried to talk with anyone about money hidden in Switzerland I'd be arrested," he recalled. "People understood that's where the hot money went...
...Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, who had butted against Swiss bank secrecy repeatedly since the 1960s, was not able to make many cases. The federal government is more earnest than ever, he says, but the resolve comes when the locus of tax evasion has already shifted to other havens. "Switzerland is not the No. 1 problem any more. The Caymans is the biggest problem," he says. (See TIME's complete coverage of the 2010 World Economic Forum...
...pull is at work during wars, natural disasters and any other time our hides are on the line. It was perhaps never more poignantly played out than during the two greatest maritime disasters in history: the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. A team of behavioral economists from Switzerland and Australia have published a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that takes an imaginative new look at who survived and who perished aboard the two ships, and what the demographics of death say about how well social norms hold up in a crisis...
Read "Gaddafi's Oddest Idea: Abolish Switzerland...