Hearing Offshore Tax Evasion Panel 1 Witnesses from a Swiss bank and the U.S. Department of Justice testified on efforts to collect unpaid taxes from offshore bank accounts. *The transcript for this program was compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning. People in this video Cole, James M.Deputy Attorney GeneralDepartment of JusticeCerutti, RomeoGeneral CounselCredit Suisse GroupCoburn, Thomas "Tom" A. M.D.U.S. Hosting Organization Senate Committee Homeland Security and Government Affairs | Investigations More Videos From Offshore Tax Evasion Related Video Senator Levin on Offshore Bank AccountsSenator Carl Levin (D-MI) talked with reporters after a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on… U.S. U.S. Clips from This Video 10 minutes177 views 5 minutes127 views cs levin3 hours73 views 6 minutes25 views
Charles Ferguson: Banking Is a Criminal Industry Because Its Crimes Go Unpunished Consider just this month's news in financial services. First, Barclay's has been manipulating the Libor, the main interest rate upon which most other interest rates and financial transactions are based, since 2005. Moreover, Barclay's traders were colluding with traders in many other banks to assist them in manipulating the Libor too, so that they could all profit from their bets on it. Second, JP Morgan Chase is having a really great month. Third, HSBC is paying a fine because it allowed hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars of money laundering by rogue states and sanctioned firms, including some related to terrorist activities and Iran's nuclear efforts. Fourth, a new private lawsuit cites documents indicating that Morgan Stanley successfully pressured rating agencies into inflating the ratings of mortgage-backed securities it issued during the housing bubble. Just another month in financial services. So, July 2012 really isn't abnormal at all. And what is that number? Zero.
Why the 1% should pay tax at 80% | Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty In the United States, the share of total pre-tax income accruing to the top 1% has more than doubled, from less than 10% in the 1970s to over 20% today (pdf). A similar pattern is true of other English-speaking countries. Contrary to the widely-held view, however, globalisation and new technologies are not to blame. Other OECD countries, such as those in continental Europe, or Japan have seen far less concentration of income among the mega rich. At the same time, top income tax rates on upper income earners have declined significantly since the 1970s in many OECD countries – again, particularly in English-speaking ones. For example, top marginal income tax rates in the United States or the United Kingdom were above 70% in the 1970s, before the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions drastically cut them by 40 percentage points within a decade. So, the evolution of top tax rates is a good predictor of changes in pre-tax income concentration.
Elizabeth Warren: Libor fraud exposes a rotten financial system The British financial giant Barclays has admitted to manipulating the rate from 2005 to at least 2009 . When the bank made a bet on the direction in which interest rates would turn, the Barclays employees who submit data for calculating interest rates would fake their numbers to help Barclays traders win the bet. Day after day, year after year, bet after bet, Barclays made money by fixing bets for its own traders. We don’t know who else was fixing bets. Other big banks, including some of the largest in the United States, are under investigation . It is also clear that many of those who didn’t have a fixer — including consumers, community banks and credit unions — lost money. In most markets, consumers could simply take their business elsewhere once they learned that the scales were rigged. It gets worse. Real accountability would mean prosecuting the traders and bank officials who violated federal laws and prosecuting the executives who knew what they were up to.
Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer It is a tenet of American economic beliefs, and an article of faith for Republicans that is seldom contested by Democrats: If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation will stop. Trouble is, sometimes the things that we know to be true are dead wrong. For the larger part of human history, for example, people were sure that the sun circles the Earth and that we are at the center of the universe. It doesn’t, and we aren’t. The conventional wisdom that the rich and businesses are our nation’s “job creators” is every bit as false. I’m a very rich person. Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. Theory of Evolution When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. More Shoppers Needed
Modern banking's fatal flaw Does this surprise you? It should not. It has been this way since 1844. In that fateful year, the British Parliament passed the Bank Charter Act, an attempt to bar commercial banks from engaging in fractional reserve lending. Back then, people would deposit gold (the money of the day) for safekeeping in bank vaults. The banks would issue depositors with a signed contract stipulating that the bank was obliged to hand over, on demand at any time in the future, a specified weight of gold to the bearer of the contract. These banks soon realised they could create banknotes that looked just like the original banknotes, with the same contractual stipulations (that is, a claim on gold) and lend them out to merchants at interest. This was fractional reserve lending. Creating economic havoc The injection of excessive monetary liquidity into the economy fuelled euphoric speculative bubbles in asset markets. The unredeemable banknotes immediately lost all their value.
Conservative fantasies on the miracles of market Austin, TX - A central doctrine of evangelicals for the "free market" is its capacity for innovation: New ideas, new technologies, new gadgets - all flow not from governments, but from individuals and businesses, allowed to flourish in the market, we are told. That's the claim made in a recent op-ed in our local paper by policy analyst Josiah Neeley of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Austin. His conclusion: "Throughout history, technological advances have been driven by private investment, not by government fiat. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon." As is often the case in faith-based systems, reconciling doctrine to the facts of history can be tricky. The initial research-and-development for all these projects so central to the modern economy came from the government, often through the military, long before they were commercially viable. So I called Neeley and asked what innovations he had in mind when he wrote his piece.
Robert Reich: The Wall Street Scandal of All Scandals Just when you thought Wall Street couldn't sink any lower -- when its myriad abuses of public trust have already spread a miasma of cynicism over the entire economic system, giving birth to Tea Partiers and Occupiers and all manner of conspiracy theories; when its excesses have already wrought havoc with the lives of millions of Americans, causing taxpayers to shell out billions (of which only a portion has been repaid) even as its top executives are back to making more money than ever; when its vast political power (via campaign contributions) has already eviscerated much of the Dodd-Frank law that was supposed to rein it in, including the so-called "Volcker" Rule that was sold as a milder version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment from commercial banking -- yes, just when you thought the Street had hit bottom, an even deeper level of public-be-damned greed and corruption is revealed. Sit down and hold on to your chair. How is this interest rate determined?
IMF continues with its wage-cutting line In November 2015, the IMF released an IMF Staff Discussion Note (SDN/15/22) – Wage Moderation in Crises: Policy Considerations and Applications to the Euro Area – which purports to measure “the short-run economic impact of wage moderation and the implications for policy in the context of the euro area crisis”. It juxtaposes the impacts of the so-called internal devaluation approach with the impacts of Eurozone monetary policy. It recognises that the euro zone countries cannot use exchange rate depreciation to boost domestic demand but argues that instead, “lower nominal wage growth … and lower inflation or higher productivity growth relative to trading partners is needed”. The paper presents the standard mainstream arguments that: 1) wage cuts improve employment through increased competitiveness; 2) interest rate cuts stimulate overall spending; 3) quantitative easing stimulates overall spending. The IMF paper conducts an experiment whereby it conducts a simulation where there is a:
Lord Rothschild in $200 Million Bet Against Euro: Report - Business News Lord Rothschild, an elder member of the dynastic Rothschild banking family, has taken the position against the euro through RIT Capital Partners, the 1.9 billion pound investment trust of which he is executive chairman, according to a report in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. As cynicism that the single currency is on its last legs continues to spread among some euro zone politicians and the public, the influential financier has used the currency as a form of hedge. RIT has taken a 7 percent net short position in July, in terms of principle currency exposures on the euro , up from a 3 percent net short position in January. “Given a net asset value of £1.836 billion at the end of July, the position is worth £128 million,” the newspaper reported. The Telegraph quoted sources close to the banker as saying that that his current position against the euro is a realistic one given that the currency remains weak and not a “dogmatic, negative view” on the currency per se.
Men's Earnings Haven't Just Stagnated Over Past 40 Years--They've Fallen | Economy January 15, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Catherine Crampell at The New York Times Economix blog pointed to a disturbing article Thursday. But the picture is even worse than that. The bottom-line: Wages for men have not just stagnated over the past four decades, they've slipped. These data come from an article by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, both of the Brookings Institution and the Hamilton Project, the latter founded in 2006 by Robert Rubin to set forth an agenda of centrist economics for Democratic administrations to adopt. Over the past 40 years, a period in which U.S. That loss is far greater for men with less education. Labor-market dropouts are more likely to be low skilled and less educated: nonemployment among men without high school diplomas increased by 23 percentage points (from 11 to 34 percent) and among those with only a high school degree by 18 percentage points (from 4 to 22 percent).