Pure speculation (Swiss for beginners)

Philipp Hildebrand, the CEO of the Swiss National Bank,  had traded on the foreign exchange markets a few days before his bank had forced a peg of the Swiss Frank with the EUR that would guarantee an enormous profit to himself personally. No, wrong. It turns out, it was only his wife Kashya (nice name, boobs, attractive, a former porn star perhaps, no, just a former foreign exchange (FOREX) trader, owning an art gallery now, tasteful art, not the shit the Occupy WallStreet socialists would buy, or couldn't because they are too poor), Kashya, who knew nothing of her husband's plans to peg the Swiss Frank to the EUR at 1.20, and who, by exchanging enormous amounts of Swiss Franc at the right time, would make an enormous trading profit. Note that we don't use the word "speculation", the word "speculation" has been defenestrated, even here in France it's "trading" now (imagine the French pronunciation), since "speculation" triggers the wrong instincts --- instincts that were already abrogated by Queen Victoria, her of the Victorian age, the woman who famously informed her cabinet that a "wife knows everything her husband knows." So it was only Kashya, and it was only a matter of convenience that she did use her husband's account since the poor thing did not have a trading account in her own name, but it's clear that it was her, and not Hildebrand, who did the trade, since she, as a FOREX trader, obviously knew the future.

Kashya and Philipp Hildebrand, note the plant in the background

And the press of the Free World is eating this up as if it were Yorkshire pudding.

Imagine you're writing a movie script. What's next?

A missing email perchance, an email mysteriously absent from the records that the Swiss National Bank supplied to some socialist atheist Muslim investigator who had been instituted to go to the bottom of this and went there, and could not see anything wrong since the missing email was missing. Or was it somebody else, a highly-payed person (he/she) from a worldwide accountant firm with an interminable name? Like PriceWaterhouseCoopers? Yes, that's it, PwC. PwC, which failed to spot an accounting error of 54.5 billion EUR in the accounts of the Deutsche Hypobank only 6 weeks ago?  The largest accounting error in the history of the planet? That's the ticket if we need somebody to go Santorum.

And now what? Somebody's dropping a glass, it shatters, and Colombo has a heureka moment? Somebody's issuing a wallowing cry in the dark that comes from the mark, or at least from the printing presses of the Neue Deutschmark in the Swiss basement? Somebody's impersonating the dog that didn't bark in the dark? Somebody's writing a poem?

We don't know. What we do know, however, is that the missing email resurfaces, reappears as mysteriously as the account of Hildebrand's trading account itself had resurfaced (which it should not have, since there's the Swiss banking secret, and furthermore, it was sheer coincidence that Hildebrand's wife did trade in her favor on the FOREX market while Hildebrand was deciding on a peg with the Euro that would guarantee her a profit, Queen Victoria be damned).

Queen Victoria

Now, it is now that the script writer reaches the delicate point where he/she has to go into the finer points of the matter, points which the attention span of his audience may not tolerate. Details, folks (we reproduce the text here, since the link broke already once):

In der Dokumentation von Philipp Hildebrands E-Mail-Verkehr, die den zwei Prüfstellen zur Verfügung gestanden hatte, fehlt eine entscheidende Passage. Dies haben am Dienstag auf Anfrage übereinstimmend Kurt Grüter, Direktor der Eidgenössischen Finanzkontrolle und Claudia Sauter, Kommunikationsdirektorin beim Wirtschaftsprüfungsunternehmen Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) bestätigt. Die Version, die den beiden Prüfern Mitte Dezember von der SNB zur Verfügung gestellt wurde, endet am 16. August 2011 um 7 Uhr 36. In dieser Passage weist Philipp Hildebrand seinen Kundenberater bei der Bank Sarasin sinngemäss an, in Zukunft ohne sein Einverständnis keine Aufträge mehr von seiner Ehefrau Kashya für Devisentransaktionen entgegen zu nehmen.

Sowohl PwC wie auch Finanzkontrolleur Grüter führen dieses E-Mail in ihren Prüfungsberichten als entlastendes Element für Hildebrand an, von den Transaktionen seiner Frau nichts gewusst zu haben. PwC kommt zum Schluss, der Kauf von 504 000 $ Dollar in einer turbulenten geldpolitischen Phase sei zwar heikel, aber reglementskonform gewesen. Insbesondere wird gewichtet, dass Philipp Hildebrand die umstrittene Devisentransaktion noch am selben Tag dem Leiter des SNB-Rechtsdienstes meldete. Dieser gab drei Wochen später Entwarnung unter dem Vorbehalt, es sei sicherzustellen, dass es keine Wiederholung gebe. Unter dieser Prämisse mag erstaunen, dass einen weiteren Monat später, am 4. Oktober, auf dem Konto von Philipp Hildebrand ein ähnlicher Betrag, 516 000 $, in Franken zurück gewechselt wurde.

Wichtiger ist aber, und das ist erst seit Montagabend bekannt, dass der E-Mail-Verkehr zwischen dem zurückgetretenen Nationalbankpräsidenten und seinem Bankberater eine Fortsetzung fand. Der Berater erinnerte Hildebrand an jenem 16. August um 8 Uhr 00 daran, dieser habe ihm im Gespräch tags zuvor gesagt, es sei in Ordnung, wenn seine Ehefrau den Dollar-Bestand erhöhen wolle. Dieser Wortlaut gibt der Dramaturgie eine entscheidende Wende und dürfte dazu beigetragen haben, dass Hildebrand am Montag seinen sofortigen Rücktritt erklärte.

Wie ist es aber zu erklären, dass ausgerechnet diese Passage in jenem Dossier fehlt, das den Prüfern zur Verfügung stand? Laut Auskunft von SNB-Mediensprecher Walter Meier ist der Nationalbank die vollständige Version erst am vergangenen Donnerstag, unmittelbar nach Hildebrands erster Pressekonferenz, von der Bank Sarasin zugestellt worden. Die den Prüfern im Dezember gelieferte, offensichtlich unvollständige Version stammt laut Meier nicht von Hildebrand selber, sondern vom E-Mail-Account des Leiters des SNB-Rechtsdienstes. Dieser war bei der letzten E-Mail des Bankberaters, im Gegensatz zum vorausgegangenen Mail-Verkehr, nicht mehr unter Cc als Mit-Empfänger aufgeführt.

You get the gist. Everything is OK. Hildebrand's story is consistent. There's just one minor problem. There was another email, or phone call, or whatever, from Hildebrand, to his bank, to the effect that the last trade was OK (it will never happen again, but the last trade was OK), and that it was OK to "augment" this trade (so as to enlarge the position that led to the profit).

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, some wit once observed. Hildebrand stepped down yesterday. Life's not fair.