THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Consider the latest entrant in the Dumbest Fucking Bankster contest, Brady Dougan, CEO of Credit Suisse. When asked what he and other senior executives knew about his bank's efforts to help rich Americans avoid taxes with accounts in his bank, his answer can be summed up with one word, nothing.

Because we have a new wrinkle on this old adage that senior executives of large banks have no idea what actually goes on inside the bowels of the companies they get paid stunning amounts of money to run. Yesterday Credit Suisse Group AG Chief Executive Officer Brady Dougan said his bank's top bosses didn't know the employees there were helping clients hide billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service. And his statements obviously deserve to be taken seriously, given that he was testifying under oath.

"Some Swiss-based private bankers went to great lengths to disguise their bad conduct from Credit Suisse executive management," Dougan told the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at a hearing on the bank's tax-evasion services. "While that employee misconduct violated our policies, and was unknown to our executive management, we accept responsibility for and deeply regret these employees’ actions.”

According to the Senate panel's report on Credit Suisse, "in 2008, over 1,800 Credit Suisse bankers in eight different areas of the bank opened and serviced Swiss accounts for U.S. clients." At one point there were 22,000 such accounts holding 12.4 billion Swiss francs ($14 billion). Yet the misconduct, as Dougan called it, was unknown to Credit Suisse's most senior executives. Imagine that.

Perhaps they also weren't aware back then that Swiss banks had a reputation for helping wealthy foreigners evade taxes in their home countries. If you were to ask the average guy on the street what Swiss banks do, there's a good chance he would say something like: Hide money for rich people with secret bank accounts. But maybe that's something Credit Suisse's CEO wouldn't know his bank was doing in real life.

Even the janitors are expected to be more aware of what is happening than that. And everybody listening knew he was lying or was he?