I was introduced to the term “Gnomes of Zürich“ by Steve Jackson’s humorous conspiracy-themed game, Illuminati, where the secretive Swiss bankers were one of the factions vying for global domination. I never hunted down the origin of the term though:
Although Swiss bankers had been criticised in Britain since the 1950s, the term “gnome of Zürich” originated in a crisis meeting of the Labour politicians in November 1964. The politicians blamed Swiss bankers for raising speculation against the pound. During the meeting, politician George Brown criticised the Swiss bankers and said, “The gnomes of Zürich are at work again.” The term “Gnomes of Zürich” was then used by many other politicians of the time. Then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson vowed to resist the gnomes’ sinister power.
I did a quick review of ‘The Panama Papers’ and Fehrenbach’s ‘The Swiss Banks’ at alt-history:
The Panama Papers, Bastian Obermayer and Frederick Obermaier; ‘The Swiss Banks’ TR Fehrenbach.
‘No large transfer of property is public,’ says Mr Mammon in CS Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, and here are two books on how money moves around secretly. The Panama Papers started as an anomymous informant downloading gigabytes of emails from an extremely secretive and crooked legal office, which handled 300,000 businesses from the 1970′s to 2015. In The Panama Papers the secret movement of money is always bad, and they sure have a lot of examples of spectacularly, obviously bad people doing bad things by moving money secretly.
Fehrenbach is disinterested. In his history of the Swiss banks, the Swiss are just normal bankers like every other bank up to about 1912. Secretive? Sure. Fehrenbach explains that banking has been secretive throughout history. The relationship between a banker and a client being something that obviously requires discretion, like doctors and patients, or lawyers and clients. But every country that fought the World Wars went bankrupt, and their banks with them. The Swiss, like the Swedes, were neutral and remained solvent. After WWII, Nazi refugees fled to Sweden, Argentina, and Switzerland, or at least ran money through them. The US needed Sweden and Argentina as allies in the cold war, and they were relatively bigger than Switzerland, so US pressure focused on the Swiss banks and US media gave the Gnomes of Zurich a bad name.
By 1966 when Fehrenbach wrote, there were two big changes in Swiss banking. One, since de Gaulle set France in order, it has been possible for the average French businessman to trust the French government and not simply get looted, unlike 1789-1959. Two, the Other Banks in Switzerland, under Swiss law but owned by foreigners, have become the financial capital of the Mideast. Arabs and Israeli bank in Switzerland to filter out the moral hazard of dealing with each other directly in a sometimes unstable area.
The phrase “gnomes of Zurich” is used by idiots in Britain in the same way “the bond market” is used by idiots in America.
(Wikipedia: ‘Clinton political adviser James Carville said at the time, “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”‘)
So with Canada or US banks seizing money, where will US money flee?
Fehrenbach said Swiss banks started with French Huguenots fleeing Catholic massacres for Switzerland. Spanish American money, down to the small storekeepers, has fled communism for American banks since the Castro brothers broke Cuba’s middle class down to small storekeepers. African money has fled Africa since nationalization. Where can US money flee?
Well, there’s always barter.