Supermoney by Adam Smith

Author:Adam Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

The next morning we went back to the bank, and I went over various reports on European issues and European currencies. I also used my new bank to make an investment.

The Bank for International Settlements is the international clearing house for the central banks of governments. It is through this bank that government currency swaps are engineered, and also through this bank a government that is going too deeply into deficit in its international accounts is told to shape up. The stock of the bank is held by the member governments: the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and so on. Every once in a while there seem to be a few stray shares floating around, and so there was this day. For something like $1,100, I bought one share. Then the stockholders were the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Italy, and Adam Smith. I think I had in mind going to a meeting of the stockholders, or having some conversations with them, but I never got around to it.

Paul had a present for me. It was a diseased cocoa pod; someone had brought it to him, and there had been a section on cocoa in my book which Paul liked. We took pictures of each other holding the cocoa pod in front of the Bank for International Settlements. In the light of what was to happen, it was the ultimate in irony.

I got on the train for Zurich. Swiss trains were supposed to run with the precision of watches; the train was to leave at 11:59, and I had just had my Swiss watch set. Starting at 11:57, I watched the sweep of the second hand. The train left ten seconds early.

In Zurich I had appointments with several major banks. Sometimes, peripherally, I would drop the name of my new bank into the conversation just to test the reaction. There wasn’t much of one. Those that had heard of it didn’t know much about it; one banker who had thought the bank was “very aggressive,” which in Switzerland is not a term of praise.

In Zurich the visceral feeling I had about Switzerland and money began to be confirmed. Now, I do realize that a week spent in banks does not provide a very broad background for generalizing about a country. You could spend a week on the ski slopes and come away with a different feeling, or a week in the chocolate factories, or some time with watchmakers or with the cuckoo-clock guild. Nonetheless, there is something about Switzerland and money that makes it ultima Thule, the country that provides one definitive end to the spectrum. After all, why Swiss banks? Most Western industrialized countries have well-developed banking systems, and a number of countries—Lebanon, the Bahamas, and Uruguay—have imitated the Swiss system of secrecy. Lebanon even used the Swiss banking code as a model. Still, for its size and per capita income, Switzerland leads the world in this profession. Why? It is the Swissness of the Swiss, and it might be interesting to take a moment to see how they got that way.

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