By Steve Sjuggerud in DailyWealth:

My first trip to a Swiss bank was not at all what I expected...

I don't know about you, but I expected something out of a spy novel... You know, a beautiful young woman behind a wood-paneled counter, asking for your secret account number and whisking you down to an impenetrable vault. I expected to see guards everywhere, courteous... but packing heat.

I was a guest of a rare coin wholesaler who'd arrived in Zurich on a private jet. To get into the vault, we walked up to a counter that could have been in a Peoria bus station. The vault itself looked like a big locker room at the local gym.

"Zurich ain't what it used to be," the coin dealer told me.

"When FDR made it illegal to own gold in America in 1933, all the smart or rich people sent their gold coins to Swiss banks," he said. "For decades, I'd come over to these Swiss banks, load up with pre-1933 U.S. gold coins, and then sell them to coin dealers back in America."

This U.S. coin wholesaler introduced me to the head of the bank's coin department. "We're essentially out of U.S. coins," the banker told us. "We actually go to America to buy U.S. coins. We bring them back to Switzerland to sell, because clients think we'll have them."

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