[jcattle]

I'm not suprised that in the swiss economy no one bats an eye at 1000 CHF bank notes. After all the swiss are historically known for being the classy alternative to launder and store your ill gotten gains from, for example, your stint as the dictator of an African country.

But there has been some changes in recent years so I don't know how it is today.

[pjc50]

The absolute peak of that was, of course, during WW2 when vast amounts of stolen or looted money, gold, and other valuables ended up being laundered through Switzerland and kept in anonymous accounts. Mostly by Nazis, although not exclusively. There was a long campaign of litigation by the descendants of Holocaust victims to get some of it back.

In the 21st century the US eventually pressured them into not being a tax haven for anonymous money hidden by US nationals.

The twin questions of tax and terrorism remain as pressure against money laundering.

[roromainmain]

The usual (gu)estimate is that 1 to 3% of UK GDP is exposed to suspicious foreign wealth. It is estimated to be 15 to 20% of Switzerland GDP today. So indeed, it doesn't make sense for Switzerland to limit circulation of cash or increase tracability.

[mike_hearn]

Those estimates aren't based on anything real. The entire financial system including things like insurance and pensions is only 10% of Swiss GDP. Private finance is like 1% or less. And the AML rules are the same as everywhere else because they're standardized by the FATF.

You get a lot of nonsensical talk in other countries about the Swiss economy because the alternative would be to admit that it's a genuinely strong economy and thus that the Swiss are doing things right. There's a culture in the British civil service of assuming there's nothing that can be learned from other countries policy-wise.

[mike_hearn]

That's a sort of standard cope found abroad but bears no relation to reality. It's not easier to launder money in Switzerland vs anywhere else. Actually it's much harder because of the generally high level of policing here. Dictators and oligarchs often end up in London instead.

Look at the article and note the common themes: money is frequently laundered through dodgy chains of high street stores that don't seem to have any actual customers. Everyone is aware of this problem but nobody solves it. What the article doesn't explain is why: it's because these chains are largely owned by ethnic minorities and the left wing governments that have ruled Britain for decades are terrified of anything that looks like an ethnically targeted crackdown, or anything that could be called "Islamophobia".

Good luck running a fake vape shop in a Swiss village, lol. I've never seen or heard of such a thing here. In Britain you can just drive for a while and see lots of them. Look at the sibling comments where British police won't even investigate car theft (the idea there's not lots of street crime there is crazy). Come visit Zürich and it won't take long until you see bobbies on the beat, just cruising around looking for trouble. Levels of attention to low level street crime are completely different.

The origins of the Switzerland/ML link are the numbered (anonymous) bank accounts available and used in WW2, often by Jews trying to preserve their wealth from confiscation by the Nazis. Along with a general culture of financial privacy in which the local governments are constrained by law from obtaining all your transaction data from banks.

The AML system was invented by Americans who cared a lot about the war on drugs, tax evasion, and later, the war on terrorism. They didn't care about financial privacy at all, probably because they never lived right next to Nazis or communists, or experience floods of refugees fleeing totalitarian governments during WW2 (not on the scale Switzerland did). So the global AML system has been built largely by America threatening huge trade sanctions on any country that didn't agree to comply and financial privacy be damned. After all, Uncle Sam is the very avatar of democracy and freedom so who could object to it knowing everything?

Culture of financial privacy <-> American sanctions. Who wins? The answer is the US wins and Switzerland implemented all the rules long ago. Swiss citizens get some level of privacy from their own government, but Swiss banks will hand over all your data and then some to the US government if you're a "US person" - a category much broader than merely being a US citizen. So banks and sometimes other companies here often have you declare that you're not a US person because dealing with such persons results in the full force of the AML/FATCA compliance cannon being pointed at the org and it's too expensive and dangerous to deal with.