Financial Transparency Coalition

This blog post is the second in a two-part blog series. In this post, I survey this year’s progress and momentum in global policy on transparency issues. In the first post, I examined several of the year’s biggest global trends and their relationship to financial transparency. The European Union has made huge policy progress this year. From anti-money laundering to country-by-country reporting, when it comes to transparency issues, the EU was an all-star. In perhaps the biggest news out of the EU this year, after months of deliberations, EU nations agreed to national-level registries to collect information on the beneficial...

This blog post is the first in a two-part blog series. In this post, I observe several of the year’s biggest global trends and their relationship to financial transparency. In the second post, I will examine this year’s progress and momentum in global policy on transparency issues. Rising Income Inequality In the United States, policymakers across the political spectrum have become increasingly vocal about the rising income inequality. They include Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who called this the “issue of our time,” Senator Paul Rand (R- KY) who admitted income inequality is a problem, and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and...

Happy Cyber Monday! In case you are from a country that doesn’t observe holidays devoted to consumerism: “Cyber Monday” is a marketing term for the Monday after Thanksgiving, created to persuade people to shop online. To those of us interested in banking and financial transactions – Cyber Monday is a fitting symbol for the emergence of online shopping and digital transactions. Over the last few years, e-commerce sales have grown by a stunning 20% annually around the world, and in the United States, e-commerce sales have increased by a steady 5% per year since 2005. Meanwhile, recent massive data breaches...

About fifteen years ago, the leaders of the world convened at the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations. In the year 2000, at the turn of the century, the world’s leaders adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, a commitment to dramatically reduce poverty worldwide. All 193 member states of the United Nations and 23 organizations agreed to achieve the following set of goals:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
2. Achieve universal primary education;
3. Promote gender equality and empower women;
4. Reduce child mortality;
5. Improve maternal health;
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases;
7. Ensure environmental sustainability; and
8. Develop a global partnership for development.

The nations set a deadline for these goals: 2015....