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In France, “rue” is street, and “chapeau” means hat. I mean,
it’s like the French have got a different word for everything!
Steve Martin, American comic
All these nanciers, all the little gnomes of Zurich and the
other nancial centers, about whom we keep hearing.
Harold Wilson, British prime minister
“International banking”—it even sounds intimidating. You
get a picture of people with MBAs from Harvard and Oxford,
doing all sorts of unusual, even unnatural things with money
that normal people can’t begin to understand, let alone dupli-
cate. There are people like that (a couple of whom provided
insights for this chapter), but most inter