About Nick Shaxson
Quote of the day: the London Black Hole and the Finance Curse
Our quote of the day comes from Tim Hames, director general of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, via an excellent article on London by Charles Goodhart, which is well worth reading in its own right. ‘As far as the professional middle class is concerned London has become a form of gigantic black hole dragging everything into it.
Read the full article…UN Tax Committee meeting: dissenters absent?
We have often commented on the fact that the OECD, a club of rich countries, dominates rule-making on international tax while its much broader (and more legitimate) counterpart (perhaps one might say ‘competitor’), the UN Tax Committee, has been left in the shade. Not only has the OECD (and its member states) ensured that the UN Tax Committee is under-resourced and
Read the full article…Brisbane G20 event: be part of the world’s biggest mock tax haven
From Micah Challenge in Australia, an event that comes ahead of the G20 world leaders’ meeting in Brisbane due on November 15 and 16. They introduce it in their press release: “On Saturday 8 November, hundreds of concerned Australians dressed as corporate accountants will transform part of Brisbane’s CBD into a tax evader’s paradise of palm trees, mocktails, beach chairs and briefcases
Read the full article…Panama voices call it “Badge of Honor” to be called a tax haven
We recently blogged about Colombia’s decision to blacklist Panama because of its hostile role as tax haven for all sorts of dirty, criminal and corrupt Colombian drugs money. We also noted that Panama had the temerity to be outraged. Now, from PanAm Post, something that really should stick in the craw: “Recently, the Santos administration placed Panama, a traditional Colombian ally, on its list
Read the full article…The myth of competitiveness: how to build a fairer city
In recent years we’ve been talking a lot about ‘competitiveness’ from the perspective of whole nation states. There’s a whole lot of nonsense that’s talked on this subject, and a whole lot of unnecessary damage caused to economies in the name of ‘competitiveness. Our blog about Bono and Ireland a few days ago was just the latest in our thinking in this area. There’s
Read the full article…Occupy in London is back – many riot police, but where are the media?
By Gail Bradbrook, a TJN supporter who was at the Occupy protest: “There is currently an occupation in Parliament Square, England, in protest at the capture of democracy by financial interests; a feature of what we at TJN call the Finance Curse. TJN’s director, John Christensen, was amongst the speakers yesterday, with Tax Justice a major theme. A host of
Read the full article…Austria’s tax treaties: reducing developing countries’ revenues?
We’ve written a fair bit about tax treaties in the past few days, and have also updated and slightly expanded our tax treaties page. Now, in the spirit of the week, we offer a guest blog from Martina Neuwirth of the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC,) highlighting a study of Austrian tax treaties by Julia Braun and Daniel Fuentes,
Read the full article…A reminder of why everyone is underestimating inequality
In 2012 we published a document entitled Inequality: you don’t know the half of it, in which we made the fairly obvious point that studies estimating inequality almost always fail to take offshore wealth (and income) adequately into account, and thus get things wrong at the top end of the income and wealth scale. We consulted a range of experts, and (as you
Read the full article…Quote of the day: City of London and financial fraud
One of a long line of “quotes of the day: this one from 2013, but still relevant today The “race to the weakest supervisor” did not occur only within the U.S. Brooksley Born and a former senior SEC official have confirmed to me that UK regulators directly pitched U.S. financial firms to relocate operations to the City of London in
Read the full article…EU Savings Tax Directive to be repealed?
The EU Savings Tax Directive (EUSTD) has been the EU’s flagship transparency initiative since its introduction in 2003, and we have written about it on many occasions. It complements another EU transparency scheme called the Directive on Administrative Co-operation, which was beefed up this week, as the Wall St. Journal reported: “European Union finance ministers agreed Tuesday on a far-reaching crackdown on tax
Read the full article…Bono: Tax Haven Salesman for the Celtic Paper Tiger
We’ve been (almost) biting our TJN tongues on Mr. Bono’s latest outburst since the weekend. We were waiting for this to come out. Cross-posted from Naked Capitalism, with permission. We’ve tweaked a couple of words here and there. Bono: Tax Haven Salesman for the Celtic Paper Tiger By Nicholas Shaxson Paul Hewson, an Irish crooner who likes to go by the name of
Read the full article…Picture of the day: the global wealth pyramid
Credit Suisse’s new Global Wealth Report is out. As always, it contains a ream of useful data. For instance, it estimates that global household wealth reached US$263 trillion in mid-2014, up from $117 trillion in 2000: “Between 2008 and mid-2014, mean wealth per adult grew by 26%; but the same period saw a 54% rise in the number of millionaires,
Read the full article…Tax haven Panama: it’s time for blacklists and sanctions now
Ten years ago Jeffrey Robinson published a book about tax havens called The Sink, where he quotes a U.S. Customs official as saying of Panama: “The country is filled with dishonest lawyers, dishonest bankers, dishonest company formation agents and dishonest companies registered there by those dishonest lawyers so that they can deposit dirty money into their dishonest banks. The Free
Read the full article…Tweet of the day: Bono and the “Double Irish” tax loophole
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