Can Poor People Open a Swiss Bank Account? - By Uri Friedman

In launching a new attack ad that dismisses Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a "guy who had a Swiss bank account," the Obama campaign has once again thrust the debate over offshore banking into U.S. political discourse. As the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger noted on Wednesday, the words "Swiss bank account" still carry a stigma even though there's no evidence that Romney -- who revealed back in January that he had failed to disclose $3 million in a since-shuttered account with the Swiss bank UBS -- evaded U.S. taxes on the interest earned by the assets he parked in Switzerland.

"There are only 2 reasons to have a Swiss bank account: hedging against the dollar or avoiding paying fair share in taxes," Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt tweeted on Tuesday.

LaBolt, of course, overlooked a third reason for having a Swiss bank account: living in Switzerland. But as for the Obama campaign's broader effort to paint Romney as an out-of-touch corporate raider, is it still fair to associate Swiss bank accounts with lavish yachts, trust funds, or other accoutrements of wealth? Even more to the point, can I -- a young journalist in the United States with minimal savings -- get my own Swiss bank account?

It may have been a cinch a couple of decades ago, but my chances are pretty slim today. Switzerland's reputation -- as a bastion of bank secrecy laws that help unsavory characters conceal their riches -- doesn't really square with reality these days, and that has implications for who is eligible to open a bank account there.

The climate in Switzerland began changing in 1998, when Swiss banks reached a landmark settlement with Holocaust survivors whose families' assets were stolen in World War II and tucked away in vaults in Geneva and Zurich, and later faced criticism for holding the assets of international pariahs such as former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Over the past decade, Swiss banks have increasingly come under pressure to comply with financial sanctions on rogue actors and butted heads with U.S. authorities over abetting tax evaders -- most recently in a case in which a U.S. judge forced the Swiss bank Wegelin to forfeit $16 million.

The upshot of all this is that Switzerland's more than 300 banks are now more selective about which American clients they accept -- and more concerned about complying with U.S. regulations -- than they were a decade ago. In 1997, for example, Fortune magazine informed readers that you can "become the James Bond of your dreams" without opening up an expensive, über-secret "numbered" Swiss bank account, pointing out that banks such as Credit Suisse and the Union Bank of Switzerland (now UBS) permitted Americans to open up a checking account with an initial deposit of as little as $3,500 -- via "fax or even old-fashioned mail service," no less.