Financial Transparency Coalition

Aid doesn’t work. It’s a statement I hear a lot. Development aid often gets siphoned off by corruption. Aid in the form of money is inefficient, often getting lost in red tape and bureaucratic mess, while those in need see nearly none of it. Aid in the form of goods encourages dependency. Almost in response, private sector capitalists have responded with microfinance. Indeed, the microfinance has seemed like an answer to this conundrum. It the free-market’s response to one of the most difficult questions in development economics: how can we help without undermining the very goal we...

Cocaine is the drug of choice in several European countries, but most notably, Spain, which has the highest per capita consumption of cocaine in the continent. It is so prevalent, in fact, that researchers have found the drug in an analysis of the air in Madrid and Barcelona (concentrations are even higher on weekends). And if you examine a random bank note in Spain, there is a 94% chance you’ll find traces of cocaine on it. This problem hasn’t been getting much better for Spain or for the rest of Europe, for that matter. In fact, in November of...

New York Times columnist and prize-winning author Tom Friedman is perhaps best known for his arguments for infrastructure—green or otherwise. His columns and books often, perhaps even ad nauseam, compare U.S. infrastructure to China’s, where “a bullet train to Tianjin…takes just 25 minutes to make a 75-mile trip.” Friedman also loves to deride U.S. terminals, like the “faded, cramped” LAX and NYC’s Pennsylvania station where the escalators don’t work. Though I’m not sure rebuilding LAX would solve our problems, I agree with Friedman on principal. I also believe in the vital importance of infrastructure—whether...

In all public safety efforts, officials must keep one step ahead of their criminal counterparts. The U.S. Military and Intelligence are constantly developing new strategies and weapons to respond to the ever-changing tactics of terrorists. Police forces worldwide persistently apply new technologies to solve crimes and catch criminals. It is the same for financial crimes and anti-money laundering (AML), in particular. In the past few years the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental organization founded to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, has made progress in several countries worldwide. In the Philippines, for example, the country’s Congress...