Your entire argument is flawed. Not a single EU resident would keep a CHF deposit account due to low interest rates and currency risk. Deposits are in Euros. You didn’t know Swiss banks can offer multi-currency deposits?. Also interest for Eu Savings tax, is mainly from Eurobonds.

So you may as well delete this entire article, as it is 100% debunked. Amazing….

Tim adds: Not a single one? I am an EU resident in the euro zone and I have $, £ and € accounts. True, I don’t have a CHF one, but your assertion that not one EU resident would have one seems a rather flawed assumption. I do indeed note, something which if you’d bothered to parse the post, that accounts can be in Switzerland and be in other currencies than CHF. “Seems like a very odd assumption to me, to be sure. I mean you can have foreign currency accounts there, for sure, but would everyone?” That’s something of a clue you might think.

We have an empirical question here. Murphy’s calculations rest on the case that all and every one of those accounts held by EU residents is in €. There are, you might note, a number of EU residents whose domestic currency is not the €. Thus the assumption that all of them would squirrel their money away in € is highly suspect, to say the very least. But it is an empirical question: if 100% of those accounts are in € then Murphy is correct. If less than 100% he isn’t. And until we find out what the percentage of accounts in € is, a factual matter, we won’t know.

Finally, I do hope you know that “eurobonds” does not refer to bonds denominated in euros? It’s a description of a legal status, not a currency one. Indeed, at least until recently (I don’t know the modern figures) the largest eurobond markets were in US $. And there are GBP eurobonds, € eurobonds, CHF eurobonds, SEK eurobonds, even Yen eurobonds….

“100% debunked” would be slightly over-egging your pudding there I think.

Oh, and as you told me via email, there’s a US $ compenent to those holdings. The $ falling quite heavily against the € in the year in question, something which would of course lower the amount of tax with held.

His position put simply is that its everyone’s (individual and corporate entity) duty to maximise their tax payment.