Well, so much for honor among thieves, at least as the U.S. government defines the t-word. Swiss bankers felt they had no choice but to violate the two greatest things in life (select “Read More” to see video clip). But this time, the allegations were quite a bit more serious than selling cigarettes without a retail permit, and there was no grinning mob lawyer to make the whole thing go away. They compiled a list of alleged tax violators and then published that list, both in the Swiss federal newspaper and on the Internet.

Since 1934, Switzerland’s banking privacy law has made it a magnet for foreign accounts and a story element in countless film noires. But judges and lawmakers have been chipping away at the law for a number of decades, and according to some observers, near-relentless pressure from the government’s six-year Foreign Account Tax Read More