Zurich

(Note: I just read Max's post about his frustration with Airline Tickets, and well, I already think the guy walks on water, but, english isn't his first language, and he writes better than I do. Sigh. Something to aspire to. Anyway, I can't wait to see them in St Petersburg)

Dear blog;

Zurich. I have a new favorite city. Nice shops, sophisticated people. Well mannered. Great service in stores. The food was even better than here in Italy. Of course, one of the restaurants was Italian, but both were impeccable. Still impossible to navigate the place, even with a GPS system.

A few things I noticed:

1) The men are uncommonly fit, even for a city. Haircuts are short. Waiters are serious and fast moving. The cashier who runs the late night cafeteria on the highway is from Kansas. (I think her name was Dorothy. Either that or I needed the cappuccino to stay awake for the rest of the drive more than I though I did.) But seriously, the men are fit. There is clearly a social code here that says you have to run two miles a day if you're a banker. It must be in the Quals. The lawyers are all shoddy looking and have bad skin, but the bankers look like they play three sets of racquetball between meetings and have a shower in the back room. Their US counterparts at least in the investment banking community would wear shirts with less synthetic fibers. And you wouldn't put a client in a room without air conditioning in the US, even though they do not employ such common devices with abandon here. But they're all fit. I have gained ten pounds since May and I feel like a leper around here. On the way home I noticed a map of the alps with 35 equidistant hikes drawn out, and tried to marshal the will to do them like I was some teenager watching a bruce lee moving vowing to become a kung fu master. I am older now and know that such fantasies are just that. Instead I'll be more careful eating, and double my hikes. Not that I can do much about either while living in hotel rooms and eating restaurant food while adapting to jet lag over eleven time zones.

2) There are an oddly large number of men in their late fifties or early sixties that hang out in front of the brokerage houses and stare at tickers as if they were Amsterdam prostitutes They stand there for an hour. I mean, what's the point of making money like that? I guess if it's you're retirement and you see it as buying yourself days that's one thing, but otherwise I just don't see the whole point of living if that's what life consists of.

3) We met a woman who looks so much like someone from our office at home that it's almost disturbing. Here is her picture. She's born and raised in one of the German cantons. Same voice even. Same body language. Same smile. You know in the new version of Battlestar Galactica, how the Cylons are clones of each other? I sort of got that feeling. If I ever hear the real person say "By your command" (a Cylon favorite response) I'm going to shudder in fear and assume a nuclear attack is coming. In France, actually, in Brittany, which is technically only French by conquest, I met a dozen people that looked like me, enough that it was comforting. But certainly no dopplegangers. We live in the fantasy that we are chaotically special individuals. but in reality, there are X number of variables handed down and we do not seem to vary from them all that much. I have spent a lot of time learning about different ancient tribes and it is very clear to me that those same tribes walk around today, and while each member considers himself an individual according to the religion of the day, I simply see dog breeds acting on general tendencies that they were bred for, and tend to laugh to myself when each of us thinks we're innovative and special. I know my family well enough to know that I am a clone that goes back for a few hundred if not thousand years, and my son is an accurate clone of me only marginally different in terms of temporary experience, but his basic tendencies are as invariant as any template of such complexity could be.

4) The dollar is relatively week and it is clear why the euro is now more widely in demand than the dollar. The newspapers and magazines still see the US as the weather vane by which to run the social, political and economic universe, and English, because English is the language of the accounting, legal, finance and trade system put in place as far back as Elizabeth I. But the marginal difference in things is no where near what it was five, ten or twenty years ago. And we are NOT producing evolutionary knowledge faster than the rest of the world any longer.

5) Banking. This country is a bank. That's it's claim to fame. It oozes banking and finance. No dirty manufacturing or laborer problems here. Everything is tidy. While I'm not so happy that Germans have lost their desire to protect Europe (ne: christiandom) from "The East", and are making the country "east turkey" as fast as we are making the US "north Mexico", I am glad that this group of them chose Banking because the german character is perfect for it.

There are tickers in windows and banks the size and frequency of Starbucks in Seattle. Every designer has a store here. There are watches, watch stores, and whole magazine racks full of watch books. I wear fairly inexpensive watches (Skagen -denmark) because I break up to three of them a year, so I feel like I have a bad haircut and need to put on a hat, and deftly put my watch in my pocket so that I don't make a fashion heresy, or represent myself as some member of a lower caste.

But banking is what this city is about. And it made me wonder why we don't have relationships with our banks at home in the US. Of course, I know the answer: Computers.

Not that long ago, you didn't need a financial advisor, because the bank was run by local business people from the town, and employed fairly intelligent and talented people who could give you financial advice. Less than twenty years ago, you could still go into a bank and have them help you work out a plan to get out of debt, or finance a house or whatever. Now bankers are from the bottom third of their class, and if you're lucky they can speak English. A bank is a wallmart where you buy products, but none of those products is advice.

Want to make money? Open a chain of banks (it's quite easy really) that are franchises, where the president, and the team are local bankers, and where only a little of the money goes to the headquarters for administration expenses and necessary services like reinsurance. Let local people take the risk and reward for who they loan to. This might not work everywhere, but it would work in suburbia well, and certainly, one of the reasons we are such consumers is because we are operating in a financial vacuum. Money is everywhere, the people around us spend it, so we spend it. The government prints it for us like there is not tomorrow. The bankers lend it as if Santa delivers payments for people on Christmas morning. Few families today have had money for two or three generations and are passing down financial management knowledge as a key skill which has been done for centuries among the wealthy families. We are hiring accountants, tax men, and financial advisers to tell us common sense principles, and they are creating dogma, and code words as if they are scripture, that make these very common sense ideas seem mystical, and thereby keeping the masses ignorant, as if they are medieval catholic priests interpreting the bible for superstitious peasantry. The fact is that we cannot hide from our ignorance, or have our ignorance hidden from us forever. You want to fix our economy? Take computers out of banking centers, and make many small banks where loan officers are financial advisers. Pay them four times the median salary (they can earn it easily) plus a small commission. Let teams of wise people make decisions based upon their understanding of each individual. Make them responsible for the success of those people that they lend to. This is not an innovation.

During the computer revolution most banking became centralized. This did a couple of things. It took talent out of the local offices. And it created bureaucracies in large banks. The amount of money consumed by these headquarters offices in salary alone is staggering. On the other hand (and I don't have the reference) it appears that more than three quarters of the people in any main office of administration in any large bank, are actually useless. Meanwhile the average American has lost the one advisor that was truly important to him, and is denied a partnership with a person who can foster entrepreneurship and lifelong security.

Move computers out of large banking centers. These large banks only serve large companies and they hurt small business and consumers. They stifle innovation. They manufacture ignorance in the populace. They are one of the primary reasons for the downfall of western civilization.

I already have one company, and another in the wings. If I had one more to do, I would try to make this happen. I know that credit unions are of this variety, but there are not enough of them and there is not a good enough marketing campaign out there to redirect enough capital nationally, and to retrain our people. I could do it if I had another lifetime. Hopefully someone else will.

Now, if you're one of those people who thinks that this isnt financially viable I'll be happy to debate it with you. But it's pretty simple really.

The Swiss are not successful simply because of their privacy. Their successful for their customers service. I use schwab, and one other. But talking to them, while better than a normal bank, is still a bit like talking to the three stooges, and while they have financial advisers, trying to get financial advice out of them is laughable at best. They are simply community-college script readers following scripture from heaven and attempting to tell you that they possess some wisdom. they do not. Anyone who is very wise in this universe is not available to common people at any brokerage. and those that are cunning are people who you should not talk to. So you are left with the unwise, and the uncunning: the imbeciles who parrot what others have told them to, and they do nothing of value for you.

Curt