Financial Transparency Coalition

From the Treasure Islands site: Treasure Islands took some trouble to explain how small U.S. states such as Delaware were serving essentially as offshore centres within the United States, offering secrecy and lax regulation of various kinds, and offering themselves as 'captive states' willing to write their laws in pretty much whatever ways private interests (from elsewhere) wanted, while no consultation with anyone outside the tiny rarefied circle of insiders. Well, a new and excellent New York Times story, about the captive insurance industry, fits the Treasure Islands framework so closely as to be almost...

Copied from the Treasure Islands site: This headline is translated from that of an article in the French newspaper L'Expansion which is in French, with a rough web translation here. It is commenting on a report from the French government's Centre d'analyse stratégique (Centre for Strategic Analysis.) The report identifies 50"Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs)" or "prudential havens" as it calls some of them, and the newspaper summarises the report by saying

"These OFCs have played a major role in the production of financial engineering for the rest of the world. Their degree of financial integration with...

In Treasure Islands I briefly mention Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Sectetary from 1961-1971, who had such stridently anti-government views that he banned the publication of official statistics because they would, he said, attract too much attention from civil servants. Such is the anti-government, anti-society worldview that I have so often encountered offshore. I also quote Jack Blum, a top US criminal investigator, who described Hong Kong as an "anything-goes, no-regulation world . . corporations doing business in China set up Hong Kong companies with secret shareholdings . . today Hong Kong is where most of the corruption in...

Take a look at this article in Foreign Policy magazine, arguing that Goldman Sachs helped create, and profit hugely from, vast speculative markets in grain and other agricultural commodities, causing food prices to rise, with terrible effects. Goldman, it seems, helped turn a commodity derivatives market worth a sleepy $13 billion in 2000 into a half-trillion-plus market inside eight years. It continued:

"Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain -- the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below. Near the bottom toils the farmer. . ....