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A long-lost painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was confiscated from a bank vault in Switzerland after Italian police said it had been exported illegally and was in danger of being sold for up to £90 million. Swiss police, acting on a request by their Italian counterparts, seized the portrait of Isabella d’Este, a Renaissance noblewoman, from a private bank vault in Lugano on Tuesday. After being lost for centuries, the painting was rediscovered in 2013 in a collection of 400 artworks kept in a Swiss vault. The authorities then were alerted to the existence of the painting, but it...

The Swiss arm of HSBC Holdings Plc private banking division has been accused of helping wealthy international customers avoid taxes and conceal millions of dollars from local revenuers… So, when I make my millions, remind me to bank with HSBC.Information leaked (read: stolen) by a former IT employee of HSBC’s private banking division in Switzerland has already been used by authorities to track down potential tax dodgers; and now it is being used to cast partial blame on the financial giant. France is anxiously combing through the illegally obtained information, and has even forwarded the information on to other countries… The...

The European Commission is hoping that a new global reporting standard will eradicate tax evasion and tax fraud in the wake of the latest revelations in Switzerland. “We are hoping that the coming into force of this new agreement at the very latest by 2018 will put an end to tax evasion and fraud by the use of secret bank accounts,” European Commission spokesperson Vanessa Mock told reporters in Brussels on Monday (9 February). The EU and Switzerland negotiated an agreement on the taxation of savings back in 2014. The plan is to unravel the Swiss tradition of banking secrecy...

A sensuous Paul Gauguin painting of two Tahitian girls has been sold from a Swiss private collection for close to $300 million, one of the highest prices believed to have been paid for an artwork, according to European and American art world insiders with knowledge of the matter. The sale of the 1892 oil painting, “Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?),” was confirmed by the seller, Rudolf Staechelin, 62, a retired Sotheby’s executive living in Basel, Switzerland, who through a family trust owns more than 20 works in a valuable collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, including the Gauguin,...

credit the world’s various political leftists for being brilliant at one thing. They have managed to assemble a coalition of interest groups whose vested interests should probably cause them to chase each other around in the street armed with shotguns. Nowhere is that awesome class divide among the left on greater display than in Europe where the Parlor Pinks infest Davos and the Street Marxians have taken electoral power in Greece. If you were to ask both Jeffrey Greene and newly-minted Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras whether they felt society should be unfettered by larger government or directed for its...

The Italian government on Wednesday said police had seized more than 5,000 ancient artefacts in a record 45-million-euro haul after dismantling a Swiss-Italian trafficking ring. Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said it was the country's "largest discovery yet" of looted works and consisted of 5,361 pieces, including vases, jewellery, frescoes and bronze statues, all dating from the 8th century BC to the 3rd century AD. The archaeological treasures came from illegal digs across Italy and "will be returned to where they were found", the minister told reporters. Police said the items were worth around 45 million euros ($52 million) and were...

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) - The global economic outlook just got brighter after this week's big stimulus from the European Central Bank, leading policymakers from around the world said Saturday. In a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, they said a perkier Europe, coupled with a prolonged period of low oil prices, could help shore up the global economy following a period of underperformance that has prompted many forecasters to reduce their growth forecasts. "Lower oil prices and the big decision by ECB could further improve world economic outlook," said Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan.

The five most miserable countries in the world at the end of 2014 are, in order: Venezuela, Argentina, Syria, Ukraine, and Iran. In 2014, Argentina and Ukraine moved into the top five, displacing Sudan and Sao Tome and Principe. The five least miserable are Brunei, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, and Japan. The United States ranks 95th, which makes it the 14th least miserable nation

Obama: Many of you have told me that this isn’t what you signed up for—arguing past each other on cable shows, the constant fundraising, always looking over your shoulder at how the base will react to every decision. Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns. Imagine if we did something different.Well, that “different” he mentioned didn’t last long. Less than an hour after the speech, a fundraising e-mail from the Democratic Party went out, signed by the president. One frustrated tweeter wrote—quote—“You can’t be serious. After taking a dig at constant fundraising, Obama sends out a fundraising...

A squadron of 1,700 private jets are rumbling into Davos, Switzerland, this week to discuss global warming and other issues as the annual World Economic Forum gets underway. The influx of private jets is so great, the Swiss Armed Forces has been forced to open up a military air base for the first time ever to absorb all the super rich flying their private jets into the event, reports Newsweek. “Decision-makers meeting in Davos must focus on ways to reduce climate risk while building more efficient, cleaner, and lower-carbon economies,” former Mexican president Felipe Calderon told USA Today. Davos, which...

One day, it’s gold. The next, it’s equities. Most days, it’s crude. On Wednesday, it was copper. On Thursday it was the Swiss franc and Swiss stocks. And the move in those two makes those others look like minor-league hiccups. While you were sleeping, all hell broke loose in Switzerland, as the central bank ditched its currency cap against the euro after four years and slashed interest rates to negative 0.75%. The Swiss franc is rallying wildly, while the Swiss stock market is cratering and U.S. stock futures are mostly on the losing side as investors figure out this latest...

The Swiss National Bank has lost control. It is the latest in a list of venerable central banks to be overwhelmed by deflationary forces and global economic disorder. The country is already in deflation. The Swiss franc ended Thursday 13pc higher after the SNB abandoned its three-year efforts to defend a currency floor of 1.20 to the euro. “We have a free exchange rate once again,” said the SNB’s president, Thomas Jordan. Indeed, but nobody is fooled by the SNB’s attempt to spin this as benign. “This is a huge hit to their credibility,” said Deutsche Bank. The official statement...

Swiss ATMs refuse to deliver Euros...

"As if millions of macro hedge funds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced" Over two decades ago, George Soros took on the Bank of England, and won. Just before lunch local time, the Swiss National Bank took on virtually every single macro hedge fund, the vast majority of which were short the Swiss Franc and crushed them, when it announced, first, that it would go further into NIRP, pushing its interest rate on deposit balances even more negative from -0.25% to -0.75%, a move which in itself would have been unprecedented and, second, announcing that the 1.20...

US Ambassador to Switzerland Suzi LeVine is being accused of violating diplomatic etiquette by posting critical comments about Swiss ski resorts on her Facebook page. “I’m trying to understand the chaos in the lift lines at Swiss ski resorts,” LeVine wrote after spending New Year’s Day at the Adelboden ski resort in the Bernese Oberland. She said she and her family enjoyed a great day at the resort “but I was so puzzled by the scrum heading to the lift (and the inefficiency in terms of how many people were on each lift)”. LeVine, a former Microsoft employee and Democratic...

Skiers trying to make their way to and from French Alps resorts were plunged into chaos on Saturday night as 15,000 cars were trapped on the roads and emergency overnight centres were set up to shelter trapped tourists. Across the Savoie region, thousands of people were trapped in their cars, snowed in their chalets or stranded at airports as long-awaited snow finally dumped on the Alps - several feet, in some places.

Human activities have little to do with the Earth's current warming trend, according to a study published by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). In fact, S. Fred Singer (University of Virginia) and Dennis Avery (Hudson Institute) conclude that global warming and cooling seem to be part of a 1,500-year cycle of moderate temperature swings. Scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing moderate natural climate cycle in the 1980s, when Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland first saw two mile-long ice cores from Greenland representing 250,000 years of Earth's frozen, layered climate history. From...

There's only one real way to compare military strength, and thankfully the world hasn't had many opportunities lately. Despite the potential powder keg in the South China Sea, standoffs in Ukraine, and proxy wars throughout the Middle East, inter-state warfare between the world's military powers has been all but banished from the global scene (for the time being, at least). For a simpler evaluation of military power, we turned to the Global Firepower Index, a ranking of 106 nations based on more than 50 factors including overall military budget, available manpower, and the amount of equipment each country has in...

The Swiss central bank plans to charge depositors a 'negative' interest rate of -0.25 per cent to discourage spooked investors from using it to shelter their cash. Money has flooded into Switzerland as market turbulence caused by the Russian rouble collapse and oil price slide has prompted a desperate search for safe havens in recent days. The Swiss National Bank said it would slash its interest rate on balances of over 10million Swiss francs from January 22 - effectively imposing a charge on depositors wanting to hold francs in a bid to keep its currency artificially weak against the euro.

Fareed speaks with Naftali Bennett, the economic minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, about Iran's nuclear program. Watch the full interview on GPS this Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN. Iran - you have said that you thought a bad deal would lead to war, but a good deal could lead to peace. So the question is, do you regard the deal that is under discussion as a good deal or a bad deal? From what we can tell, the area where they seem to be at right now is that Iran would go from about 19,000...