TREASURE ISLANDS

New report into the UK’s Overseas Territories and developing countries

Cross-posted with the Tax Justice Blog and the EU Observer blog. This nicely complements what I’ve written about in Treasure Islands, particularly in the chapter entitled “The Deep Drains of Development.”

Christian Aid and the IF campaign have a very important and topical new report available, entitled Invested interests: the UK’s Overseas Territories’ hidden role in…

David Ricardo, “competitive” banking and the Finance Curse

I’ve been reading a book called The Bankers’ New Clothes by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, which is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand banks. Jargon-free and easy to read, it was described by the FT’s Chief Economics Correspondent Martin Wolf as “the most important [book] to emerge from the crisis.” He may be right. Here’s a…

Offshore race to bottom fosters shadow insurance industry, “may need bailout”

From the New York Times:

“Investigators found that life insurers in New York were seeking out states with looser regulations and setting up shell companies there for the deals. They then used those states’ tight secrecy laws to avoid scrutiny by the New York State regulators.”

That is offshore business, and the race to the bottom – yet again.…

Financialisation as a cause of economic malaise. The Finance Curse, by other names

That’s the title of a new article on the New York Times’ Economix blog, which is an case study in what happens when an economy, such as the United States’, sees financial services grow above its optimal size. It tallies extremely closely with our Finance Curse analysis. It contains references to research I wish I’d inserted into the…

Is the BBC afraid of the City of London?

I’ve chosen this headline because I wanted to follow on from an earlier blog I wrote entitled Is the BBC afraid of tax havens? That was a very good question then, and it remains a very good question now. Amid all the global noise now about tax havens, the BBC remains a timid follower of the story, at best,…

On Google’s Eric Schmidt saying it’s fine to dodge taxes if it’s legal

Cross-posted from the Tax Justice blog: something I just wrote.

From Paul Collier, a development expert, writing in Prospect Magazine:

“For companies to claim that they are morally in the right by having devised loopholes is ridiculous, even if their behaviour has been legal. Any society rests not just on laws but on conventions that

…

The Finance curse – my new book

This morning I have published a short new book entitled The Finance Curse: how oversized financial centres attack democracy and corrupt economies. Co-authored with John Christensen, the former economic adviser to the UK tax haven of Jersey and director of the Tax Justice Network (TJN), The Finance Curse combines elements of my two previous books, Treasure Islands and Poisoned…

UK Prime Minister writes to British tax havens. How serious is he?

Headline summary from us: this contains much that is positive. But the devil…

Luxembourg versus Ireland: tax havens competing to be more rotten than each other

The FT has a story this morning entitled Investors attack ‘lax’ Luxembourg fund rules. But Luxembourg is a scuzzy little tax haven: what else where these investors expecting?

A bit over year ago I wrote a short blog pointing to a letter from recovery specialists Deminor to Luxembourg’s Finance Minister, on behalf of 2,500 disgruntled investors around…

Austerity and growth: how is it going?

This graph is interesting.

Read all about it from Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books, here.