Should the President of the United States have a Swiss bank account?

Actually, if you are doing it for currency reasons (or distrust in the American dollar or the U.S. banking system), you actually do need to trade in your dollars for Swiss francs. Totally unrelated to the Romney conversation, but not uncoincidental, is that American flows into Swiss banks have risen fairly dramatically since 2008 -- for safe haven reasons.

As I said in my first post on this thread, it actually shows sound judgment if he has half his wealth sitting in Switzerland. We are shitting all over the U.S. dollar. The Federal Reserve has accumulated a balance sheet of $3 trillion worth of toxic assets and treasuries that no one else will buy, and it has embarked on loose monetary policy to try to inflate away the problem. You actually have gotten a free return on investment just in the currency trade in, if you have traded in dollars for Swiss francs. The smartest thing to do with dollars is turn them into hard assets, in my opinion, which can't be intentionally devalued by inflating the currency the way fiat currencies can. If you are going to own a currency, though, among the safe haven currencies, Switzerland is probably the prettiest looking. Which is why there has been money flowing there.

 

Of course, none of that has anything to do with Mitt Romney, despite you trying to tie it in with your "I suppose" silliness.

This was a thread about accounts he reported on his tax returns, which is how we know about them -- there is no evidence he has hidden anything or committed any kind of tax fraud. And of course, Mitt Romney is a U.S. citizen, doesn't live in Switzerland, and hasn't tried to trade in his U.S. passport for a new nationality, because the tax collector has gone abroad to try to find U.S. citizens in order to raise revenue.

I posted really early on on this thread about how difficult it has become for a U.S. citizen trying to commit tax fraud to hide money in Switzerland since 2009, and a few people seemed to have a great deal of difficulty with that fact.

But now you link to a story points out that the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2009 has made it difficult for Americans to commit tax fraud via Swiss banks, and in fact, lots of Americans living in Switzerland are now renouncing their citizenship, rather than dealing with the U.S. coming after them.

Most of those people were less concerned with breaking the law, for what it is worth, than how difficult the U.S. makes it for citizens living abroad and having money where they live to simply file their U.S. tax return. We're the only country that makes citizens living abroad pay taxes, and then we make it nearly impossible to comply with the rules. So people are saying it isn't worth it and just handing over their passports.