Zug or Geneva for African project and trading vehicles
For a Swiss company in the African business, the choice of canton depends on its type. A trading desk with…
Geneva
Geneva is the most international of the Swiss financial centres and the world's leading hub for commodity trading. The articles collected here follow the city from the medieval fairs and the Reformation through Huguenot banking and the private bankers to the trading houses, trade finance banks and arbitral tribunals of today. They explain how Geneva's banks, traders and courts work, which rules apply to wealth management, trade finance and commodity trading, and why disputes from all over the world are decided there. Many of them are written for companies from Africa, the Middle East and Asia that trade through Geneva.
The Geneva financial centre in figures
Figures on the weight of the Geneva financial centre circulate widely, often without their year, source or definition. This article…
Geneva as a seat of international arbitration
Geneva's standing as a seat of international arbitration rests on a liberal statute, a single and fast route of challenge…
The documentary credit: strict compliance and its limits
The documentary credit is the central instrument of commodity trade finance, issued, confirmed and examined every day by banks in…
What a trading house does: arbitrage, logistics and risk
A commodity trading house buys raw materials where they are available and sells them where they are needed, organising transport,…
The Geneva stock exchange of 1850: the first in Switzerland
Geneva is credited with the first stock exchange in Switzerland, founded in 1857 at a time when joint-stock banks, railway…
Jacques Necker: a Geneva banker as finance minister of France
Jacques Necker, born in Geneva in 1732, rose from clerk in a Paris bank to director-general of the finances of…
The Fabrique: watchmaking as the capital source of the financial centre
In eighteenth-century Geneva the word Fabrique covered every trade connected with watchmaking and jewellery. This article describes how that cluster…
The Refuge: how 8,000 refugees changed a city of 13,000
Geneva’s reputation as a city of refuge rests on two waves of Protestant migration, one in the sixteenth century and…
Lyon against Geneva: Louis XI’s measures of 1462–1463 and the decline of the Geneva fairs
In 1462 and 1463 Louis XI combined trade bans, fines and generous privileges to draw the commerce of Geneva’s medieval…
The bill of exchange at the Geneva fairs: how a lettre de change worked
The bill of exchange is the most important financial innovation of the Middle Ages. It solves three problems in one…
The franchises of 1387: why Geneva permitted interest before its neighbours
The canonical prohibition of interest applied throughout Western Europe in the fourteenth century. In Geneva it applied too — and…
Geneva and Africa: commodities, elites and the return of illicit assets
Few relationships of the Geneva financial centre are as old, as dense and as contested as the one with Africa.
Trade finance: how a cargo of crude is financed, and how billions vanished in 2020
Commodity trading is a credit business. Between the purchase of a cargo and payment by the buyer lie weeks in…
Commodity trading in Geneva: structure, figures, and why two official statistics diverge
Ask what Swiss commodity trading is worth and you receive two official answers that differ by a factor of three.
The Geneva private banker: legal form, unlimited liability and the move to the corporation
In English, private banking describes an activity. In Switzerland, Privatbankier describes a legal form. The distinction is regularly missed in…
Swiss banking secrecy: enacted in 1934, ended in 2017 — and what is left of it
Swiss banking secrecy was never an absolute secret, and it has not disappeared. What entered into force in 1934 was…
The Thirty Maidens of Geneva: the first securitisation in financial history
Between 1760 and 1789 Geneva bankers built an investment structure that satisfies every element of a modern securitisation: they bought…
The Banque protestante: Huguenots, the Refuge and eighteenth-century capital
Banking in Geneva was founded by refugees and their descendants. Read the family names of the oldest houses and you…
Calvin and interest: what the Reformation actually changed for credit
Few sentences about financial history are repeated as often as this one: Calvin permitted interest and thereby made capitalism possible.
From fairs to banking: Geneva between 1387 and 1536
Anyone who wants to understand why there are banks in Geneva has to begin with the fairs. They are older…
Geneva as a financial centre: how a city of 200,000 came to manage the world's wealth
Geneva has around 200,000 inhabitants in the city and just over half a million in the canton. By population it…