If the name Delaware surfaces, “tax haven” is replaced by something like “no corporate tax” or “corporate friendly” by its fans and if it is Ireland we hear about “low corporate tax” or “tax friendly” from the big accounting firms, although Business Insider and Ireland’s Politico more bluntly call it a tax haven. Google is one of the key examples there.

Politico’s article on where FTSE 100 companies plant their money and which tax havens they use is a helpful contribution to the discussion.

The over-burdened taxpayer in the US or Ireland could be forgiven for saying yes, but these are companies that create jobs, so this kind of tax haven is okay, whereas the ones that cater to rich individuals (and Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Bahamas are likely to come to mind) are wrong because they’re just used by the rich to hide their wealth.

My sin, but your sensible tax policy

This isn’t a plea for higher corporate and wealth taxes or lower ones for those who aren’t rich. It is a plea to everyone, voters included, to stop using “tax haven” to mean a sin if you do it and sound tax savings practice if I do it. If we can get past that we might get somewhere in finding more balanced tax payment systems.

Here’s the US Government Audit Office (GAO) definition of the term, and keep in mind the list of countries mentioned above:

“There is no agreed-upon definition of a tax haven or agreed-upon list of jurisdictions that should be considered tax havens. However,various governmental, international, and academic sources used similar characteristics to define and identify tax havens. Some of the characteristics included no or nominal taxes; a lack of effective exchange of information with foreign tax authorities; and a lack of transparency in legislative, legal, or administrative provisions.”

This isn’t too far from the OECD one that has caused Switzerland trouble in the past two to three years: “factors to be considered are:

• Whether there is a lack of transparency
• Whether there are laws or administrative practices that prevent the effective exchange of information for tax purposes with other governments on taxpayers benefiting from the no or nominal taxation.
• Whether there is an absence of a requirement that the activity be substantial.”

For the record, I’ve paid taxes in four countries where I’ve lived and while there is room for improvement, I’d put Switzerland at the top of the fair tax list and the US at the bottom. A bonus: it takes me just an hour to do my family’s taxes in Switzerland.

Her trip has drawn the ire of Republicans back home, however, in the conservative press, with the state chairman of the Republican party, Ed Cox, saying “Senator Gillibrand touts her un-passed ‘Upstate Works Act’ while sipping champagne, popping canapés, and filling her campaign coffers in the shadow of the Swiss Alps. She is clinking glasses overseas when she should be cracking heads in Washington to actually get a bill passed.”

The National Journal published an article on the trip. “Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said the trip ‘shows the insane lengths that candidates and members of Congress go to raise money for their reelection campaigns.’”

The criticism of Gillibrand and underlying assumptions that Geneva = overseas Americans = wealthy Americans come shortly after James Fallows, writing  “The Fatca Chronicles” in The Atlantic, has cautioned Americans abroad that when they complain about lack of representation and  unfair tax regulations they are likely to be viewed as “whiners”:

“Something most overseas Americans don’t realize: The home-bound population does not view them as a hardship class. A known risk category for long-term expats is becoming whiners—I speak as someone who’s lived outside the U.S. for several multi-year stretches and has been known to whine,” he wrote 2 January in “The Fatca Menace”.

Americans living overseas, from Canada to Switzerland, have been complaining loudly in recent months about unfair treatment at the hands of the IRS, starting with double taxation and onerous financial reporting requirements, such as the FBAR and the impact of Fatca on their ability to have bank accounts in the countries where they live, pay rent or own homes and try to set aside retirement money.

Town hall meetings in Geneva and protests in Canada have made it clear that the complaints are coming, not from a handful of wealthy diletante expats, but from a large group of middle income Americans who happen to live outside the country and who ultimately help the rest of the world better understand the US through personal contact.

Many fall below the $92,000 earned income exclusion, the bar set by the IRS for double taxation, and they have been vocal in their complaints about how the system has nevertheless cost them unfairly and grossly.

A significant part of their complaint but one that has so far fallen on deaf ears in the US is that they are taxed without representation. True, an American abroad technically should have Congressional representatives to whom complaints and pleas for help can be sent, and these overseas citizens are supposed to be able to vote and can, in theory, help elect people who understand their concerns.

The system sounds fine on paper, but the reality is very different. For a start, many Americans who live overseas, especially long-term residents or children born abroad to US citizens, no longer or have never had addresses they can use in a US state, and your US address is the starting point for all congressional relations.

Offspring are told by some states, in order to vote and to have a congressional rep, to use a parent’s last address in a state, but this can make voter registration an onerous process. They are simply not eligible to vote in some states.

The Overseas Vote Foundation has been working hard to improve the situation, but few Americans in the US appear to be aware that for a large number of Americans overseas the basic representation and taxation rights that are so stridently defended during electoral campaigns sadly do not apply to all citizens.

Groups like Geneva-based ACA (American Citizens Abroad) have been working hard to draw attention to the issues.

But even if all US citizens abroad managed to find a senator or representative willing to listen to  them, this group is dispersed, so its voice remains weak. Their common concerns appear through a prism of all the states, so few politicians see them as having enough weight to be important.

Gillibrand isn’t just raising money for a campaign. She’s opened a conversation with a group of Americans who are often ill-treated by their own government because its elected leaders too often focus on larger vested interests. She should be given some credit by Democrats and Republicans alike for doing her homework and taking her responsibilities seriously.

China's changing household wealth: a main boulevard in Shanghai, 1985 (photo, ©2011 Ellen Wallace)

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – I haven’t stopped looking at international comparisons for cost of living and wealthy individuals, but I have stopped paying attention to them if they’re dollar-based. They’re mostly nonsense.

Looking at media reports about Credit Suisse’s new “Global Wealth Report” I almost dismissed it, thinking it would be just another list, until I took the time to look at the report itself.

We learn that the number of extremely wealthy Chinese is growing rapidly. And we learn, as TSR points out in its story about this, that household wealth in Switzerland has grown far faster than anywhere else – in dollar terms. The only real purpose that information will serve is to add to the jealousy of Switzerland that is already a small feature of life in Europe.

What matters in this report, is the groundshift it lays out clearly.

“The global wealth currently held by 4.4 billion adults has increased 72% since 2000 to reach USD 195 trillion. Driven by robust economic expansion in the emerging markets, the Credit Suisse Research Institute estimates that global wealth will grow 61% to USD 315 trillion by 2015. The middle segment of the wealth pyramid is composed of one billion individuals who are located in the fastest-growing economies of the world and who hold one-sixth or USD 32 trillion of global wealth.”

Move over USA, make way for Asia

This middle segment is composed of people whose average wealth per adult is $10,000 to $100,000, and 60 percent of them are in Asia.

The report underscores a shift that anyone who has recently spent time in the US will have felt, that this powerhouse of consumers is losing its strength to move the world’s economies. The introduction to the report states it baldly. “The Credit Suisse Research Institute believes that wealth provides people in the middle segment with the financial security they need to become the world’s emerging consumers and that the middle segment will replace indebted US households as the global economic growth locomotive.”

Switzerland and Norway, the report shows, are currently, in dollar terms, “the richest nations in the world in terms of average wealth per adult, which stands at USD 372,692 and USD, 326,530 respectively. They are followed by Australia, which is in third place with average wealth per adult of USD 320,909 and Singapore with average wealth per adult of USD 255,488. Figures for Australia and Singapore have both doubled in the last decade.”

Where there is wealth, there is often poverty

Growing wealth has not meant the disappearance of poverty, no real surprise, but the numbers are sobering. “At the base of the wealth pyramid there are three billion people with average wealth per adult of below USD 10,000, of which 1.1 billion own less than USD 1,000 and 307 million are in India.”

The report is, after all, published by a group backed by a bank, and one curious detail is tucked in here. “Some 2.5 billion people are as yet unbanked. As the wealth of this significant group grows, it will both require and fuel the creation of new financial services.”

“How the Asian superpowers compare on various measures of development” incidentally draws a stark picture of the rich-poor divide in the two countries, worse in India, if not great in China.

Switzerland in Chinese, for the rapidly budding Chinese travel market:

• episode one, Swiss TV star visits his mountain home for the national holiday, complete with digging garden potatoes, picking raspberries and visiting the neighboring cows, plus delivering gifts from China for the family and childhood memories of where how he became interested in China and traveling, ending with a dusk raclette chalet dinner (note: Liam is my son, so you see GL editor Ellen Wallace at home)
• episode two, visit to the famous Gemmi festival above Leukerbad, alphorn concert in the Alps, dawn cheese-making high above Crans-Montana and a picnic as the sun rises
• episode three, making sense of armed neutrality and citizen militia duty: training with the Swiss army’s search and rescue service and cooking with the world champion Swiss army chefs, taking time out for the Weeping Lion monument in Lucern, hitting the summer slopes in Zermatt near the Matterhorn (last is a preview for episode 4).
• episode four, summer sports like climbing and fast glacier-skiing/snowboarding in Zermatt with a former Swiss ski team champion, then Swiss mountain rescue services in action: Rega system with Air Zermatt, Air Glaciers and the amazing work of the Redog rescue dog teams. Preview of episode 5 – making Swiss chocolate, behind the scenes, mmmm.
• episode five, adding Chinese spice to a chocolatier‘s kitchen, awash in Swiss chocolate!, Barry and the St Bernard Hospice dogs including a new batch of extremely cute puppies, making the perfect Swiss army knife at Victorinox factory. Preview of episode 6 – Lake Geneva, high Alpine Furka pass steam train.
• episode six, at home in Saint Prex, Vetropak glass recycling, Furka steam train with conductor, dining and wining in Locarno, Geneva’s Slowup

Ed. note, 2 October: more than 1.3 people have viewed the first show alone on the Internet, possibly the most popular-ever China Travel Channel complete episode online!

The International Baccalaureate, more widespread in English in Switzerland than the British A-level for university entrance exams, doesn’t generate the same level of manic reporting as the UK exams. IB exam results came out in early July and while they generated a lot of skyping, Facebook chatter and e-mail, the celebrations and disappointments remained mostly private.

Not so for A-levels, on which a nation’s future depends, it always appears, and the nation debates what each year’s results really mean to the Empire. Some readers will enjoy Cook’s initial explanation of the leaping blonds phenomenon: “This is partly because many journalists are moral degenerates.” But the real explanation is even more intriguing.

no comment

A growing challenge to legitimate local news sources is aggregators that parade as local news providers. There are now a few of these that publish “Swiss” news.

Mostly we don’t say much about them and hope you spot the difference.

Sometimes they help us to help you figure it out, see left.

Update, Thursday 19:50:  Fox just ran a story about a Swiss news report on bees and cell phones, sounds remarkably familiar, but the source mentioned four times isn’t GenevaLunch.com.

I haven’t included Apidologie here, the scientific journal, but the lineup of the three articles below offers an example of some of the issues involved in correctly sourcing news articles.

Click on images of articles to view larger

Version published by Fox News in the US, 23 June

Version published by thelocal.ch, managed out of Sweden and Germany, published 23 June

Ssprueth Magers Gallery at Basel Art, 15-19 June

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The latest kid on the block to offer information on events in Switzerland is Marcus Berry, who formerly worked for WRG radio in Geneva before it became public radio station WRS, and for Swisster, which closed in December 2010. Berry’s new web site is called Inanyevent and proposes events listings country-wide, funded by advertising.

Berry’s venture joins a mushrooming collection of events listings on English-language sites.

The two most complete were both started nearly five years ago and have grown steadily: the events pages on GenevaLunch and on the AngloInfo site, both of which list regional events for the Lake Geneva area plus Swiss-wide major events of interest to the international population.

Several other sites (see list below), notably Know it All Passports and Leman Events offer a personal selection of what’s on. WRS radio offers a weekly selection and the many business clubs list their own and sometimes other groups’ events.

Relocation agencies and women’s clubs in most cities keep their own events lists and city guides: the quality varies considerably.

Web sites list events as a community service or for commercial reasons because they are “sticky”, with readers returning to a site where they know they can count on finding out what’s on. Returning visitors should hold appeal for advertisers, web business wisdom argues.

Here’s a selection of where to go to find out what’s on, in English, in the Lake Geneva region, but also in the rest of Switzerland. It iincludes only sites that are frequently updated and have a reliable track record, since several sites have started to list events then stopped or they list them erratically.

GenevaLunch volunteer has posted more than 2,500 events!

But first a well-earned word of praise for Laila Rodriguez, who has diligently volunteered for the past three-plus years to put together the GenevaLunch events lists.

Listing what’s on and finding the right balance between an incomplete list or an unwieldy one with some events of very limited appeal is far from an automatic or quick job, as many sites have learned to their dismay.

It takes time and good knowledge of the area covered to filter and get a good mix. Laila finds time every week for this behind-the-scenes unpaid labour of love, providing the international community with a valuable community service.

Next time you check out our events page think of Laila and smile, please, because she’s posted some 2,500 events for you!

Where to find out what’s on, Swiss and Lake Geneva region sites

Official tourism: Most Swiss cities list their own city events in English, useful for an overview (note: GenevaLunch events includes our selections from these) and Geneva-Annecy-Mont Blanc tourism offers events in English from over the border. Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Basel, Zurich official pages. One of the best tourism/city guides/what’s on sources of information is the newly re-launched MySwitzerland web site.

Lake Geneva region + main Swiss events, a community service, GenevaLunch events page

Geneva region, business directory + commercial (advertising) featured events, Angloinfo

Personal weekly selection of events in the Lake Geneva region, Know it all Passport

Personal selection plus their own commercial events, Leman Events

Social media: Glocals.com offers a selection of local events posted by its readers, as does the English Forum, and both are Swiss-wide, but Glocals tends to be more active in the Lake Geneva region. The English Forum and its new “local” news site are both run from Sweden and Germany, which limits its value to input from forum members who are in Switzerland.

Mainly for tourists, commercial lists: What’s on When from Frommers

Zurich is a financial capital, but definitely not the seat of government for Switzerland!

At long last, someone put together a picture for us of the Qaddafi family, all of whom are on lists for frozen assets in Switzerland: thanks go to Ria Novosti, Russian news agency. Aunts, uncles and the rest of the clan are not here, but the children are all here, with photos and their birthdates.

Bern, centrally located and on the language divide, is the capital of Switzerland

A news story mistake became the story this week, giving us a reminder of why local news providers (that’s us!) are often more credible. Associated Press in the US ran a story about Google Street View and mentioned Zurich, with the editors at a safe distance, in New York. The story noted that Zurich is the capital of Switzerland. Oops. A correction was sent out, and since the first story was picked up by several US media, word for word, a lot of corrections then appeared. Google News for Zurich suddenly had a stream of stories that started with the intriguing one-liner “Zurich is not the capital of Switzerland.”

The problem wasn’t the reporter, I hasten to add: Frank Jordans, who reported the story, has been in Geneva for several years and he’s covered enough political stories from Bern to know it’s the capital. I can only assume an inexperienced sub-editor in the US thought the world might not know the capital of Switzerland, so thought to add it.

Years from now, though, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will still be insisting that Zurich is indeed the capital of that little Alpine nation because after all, they once saw it on the news.

The mistake also underscores the growing problem of aggregated and massaged (rewritten) news stories from sites that do not themselves produce news or have journalists behind them: the story in its original form is still out there, no corrections made.

Pssst: Bern is the capital.

The BBC gives us a fun little travel story

Ice roads: here’s one of those great little feature articles we used to see regularly in mainstream media, but since editors can’t afford to pay for them anymore, they’ve become the domain of bloggers and travel groups, which is too bad. This is one of the BBC’s “from our own correspondent” series, and I fear that with BBC cutbacks in several countries we might see fewer of these, too.

Our traffic more than doubled in 2009 and again in 2010, and we’re well on the road to doing the same this year. We’ve done this on a tiny budget, with nothing like the backing of a large company like Edipresse. This is not meant as a criticism of Swisster, whose staff were good and the team made an effort. I believe, as editor of GenevaLunch, that there is a real need for online news in English that is tailored to a local/regional population, and that the key to success is getting the mix right.

As for the business model, we don’t have a magic wand, nor does anyone else in the media business right now, but we think it’s time to look further than the classic income source provided by advertising and find new and creative solutions that are the right size for each media.

Here’s my response to the Hebdo story: