Need You Now Read Free

one of the salt-and-pepper advisors in the second row. I skulked my way over, like a theatergoer arriving halfway through the first act, and took the empty chair beside him.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked under his breath.
    A door opened on the opposite side of the conference room. In walked the managing director of BOS/America, Angela Decker, with whom I had been scheduled to meet. Or so I’d thought. With her—and my quick double take confirmed it—was the chief executive of the International Bank of Switzerland, Gerhardt Klaus.
    “Is this the meeting for FAs?” I asked through my teeth.
    “Yeah, the top one-hundred-producing FAs.”
    BOS had more than eight thousand financial advisors in the United States. My invitation from Decker’s office had obviously come by mistake. “Should I leave?”
    “Stay,” he said, smiling with his eyes. “Watching you squirm will keep me awake.”
    The chief executive walked to the head of the table and remained standing as the managing director took a seat at his side. I’d never met Klaus, of course, but it was well known that he never allowed anyone to introduce him at internal bank gatherings. A vice president had sucked up so badly in Zurich last year that Klaus had forever banned all Willkommen speeches.
    “Guten Morgen ,” he said. “And thank you for coming, especially those of you who are visiting from out of town.”
    Klaus had a booming voice that required no microphone. Disciplined living and cross-country skiing kept him fit and looking younger than his years. He’d been born into a family of Zurich bankers at the height of World War II, at a time when his country couldn’t decide which side it was on. It has been said that certain Swiss banks had suffered no such indecision.
    “Each of you was invited to this meeting because we wanted you to be the first to hear a major announcement, one that is vital to the future of the worldwide operations of BOS. Without further ado, I’m pleased to tell you that a final settlement agreement has been reached between the International Bank of Switzerland and the U.S. Department of Justice.”
    A chorus of murmurs coursed through the room like a breeze through a wheat field, followed by sparse and nervous applause. Then silence.
    “As you all know,” Klaus continued, “both the Swiss government and BOS officials have been engaged in discussions for several months with U.S. authorities. These discussions . . .”
    Discussions . Talk about a fudge word. Justice had BOS by the short hairs. The same excesses and mismanagement that had rocked the largest Wall Street investment banks had forced BOS to write down $50 billion in subprime losses in the fall of 2008. The market was in free fall, the world economy was in shambles, and investors from New York to Hong Kong were in a state of panic. The oldest and largest Swiss bank had been on the verge of collapse when the government had come to the rescue with a bailout. At that precise moment, the Justice Department swooped in. With the treasury secretary and the New York Fed warning that the collapse of institutions “too big to fail” could unleash another Great Depression, someone at Justice had the presence of mind—nay, the stroke of genius—to realize that the time was ripe to make Swiss cheese of the secret Swiss banks. The DOJ officially demanded the names of “serious tax evaders.” When BOS balked, they arrested a top financial advisor who was silly enough to state publicly that he’d smuggled a diamond in a tube of toothpaste for a client. When BOS stalled again, they indicted the bank’s head of private wealth management. They threatened to indict the chairman himself. They demanded a “collateral consequences” report from BOS lawyers, which is typically the final step before the indictment of an entire company. Finally, BOS—still in a weakened state, despite the multibillion-dollar bailout—blinked. It turned over the names of 280 of the most