Financial Transparency Coalition

In the game Jenga, players take turns removing blocks from a tower and balancing them on top, creating a progressively taller, but also increasingly more unstable, structure as the game goes on. The gig is up when a player pulls out a final block and the whole structure collapses with a clatter of wooden bricks and screams of surprise. While the comparison is slightly simplistic, there are numerous ways that Jenga is just like the world’s current economic crisis. In the last few years, there have been many developments which in retrospect look like small blocks being pulled...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Executives at Swiss banks Julius Baer (BAER.VX) and Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) expect to avoid a U.S. tax investigation into their private banking businesses on the same scale as their peer UBS (UBSN.VX), they told The Financial Times on Sunday.

The Wall Street Journal has run an Op Ed by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., a member of its editorial board. Published under the title “Does the World Still Need the Swiss? : UBS’s sin was marketing secrecy too broadly.” I am struggling to work out whether it is mad, bad or just plain stupid. The hypothesis is this: that in the World War 2, more by luck than judgement the bank secrecy that the Swiss created to assist tax evaders in France helped the Jews. Of course, it also helped the Nazis: the Swiss were entirely amoral on...

Reuters has reported Swiss press coverage of UBS comments this weekend, It’s amazing stuff. A selection of the quotes are:

"The clients are not just harmless victims. They knew what they wanted to evade," Kaspar Villiger, chairman of the world’s second-largest wealth manager, said in an interview with SonntagsBlick.

"But they trusted the bank that it would work. Now we have to correct that," said Villiger, adding it was still not the responsibility of UBS to make sure clients paid their taxes.

Wrong guys. It is your job to detect money laundering through your...