Banks Are Implementing FATCA
To this progressive nature of the FATCA agreement, supporters have few arguments to oppose except legal security, but this is failing to strike a chord. A possibly better argument is that banks have already started to implement FATCA and that they will continue to do so, with or without a referendum. While this is a reality resulting from the sheer weight of the US, it remains unclear why Switzerland should necessarily legalize this state of affairs, with the added risk of making it a legal precedent.
Even so, it is not certain that Swiss banks will apply FATCA for long, as it is doubtful that this American law will be implemented at all, unless a vast majority of countries agree to participate--if anything, because the costs are unsustainable: up to 3 billion dollars for the United Kingdom, according to an official estimate and perhaps 1 billion in Switzerland (although to date there are no reliable figures). All this in order to net $892 million for the IRS if the whole world were to play the game, which very likely it will not.
In the unlikely event that Swiss banks put up a fight, there is doubt that the United States would be in a position to put their threats into action. "If Swiss banks were barred from using US dollar transactions, then the commodity trading business in Switzerland would be disturbed; this might give even more arguments to those who are currently campaigning for the replacement of the Dollar with the Euro in international trade," says Laurent Franceschetti. As the American saying goes, the US Treasury Department would end up shooting itself in the foot.
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