Financial Transparency Coalition

The European presidency has just issued a note advocating a push to increase financial transparency in Europe through its Savings Tax Directive. As they say:

"The Presidency attaches crucial importance to gear up bilateral talks in order to reach political agreement upon the adoption of the Savings Tax Directive in the very near future."

Unsurprisingly, there are some rather large flies in this ointment. Austria and Luxembourg have long been holdouts on the European Savings Tax Directive, working hard behind...

Economics is the art of reading tea leaves while taking refuge behind numbers. This truth appears to be increasingly fashionable in the West as the ‘global’ financial crisis transpires to be a western financial and economic crisis. A recent IMF paper entitled “What Caused the Global Financial Crisis - Evidence on the Drivers of Financial Imbalances 1999 – 2007” is a welcome contribution to the tea leaf reading jamboree. It has been argued that low interest rates in the US were perhaps the most important root cause for the ensuing financial frenzy. This IMF paper does not deny this theory,...