Financial Transparency Coalition

I noted the following this morning after Guernsey emailed me about it:

Guernsey plans timing for move to automatic exchange of information Guernsey’s Government has announced that it plans to give financial institutions a window from 1st January 2011 to 1st July 2011 for moving to automatic exchange of information. The Fiscal and Economic Policy Group carried out a public consultation earlier in the summer and this morning Chief Minister Lyndon Trott told the local Parliament, the States of Guernsey, of the planned transition to automatic exchange of information for the equivalent...

The Age in Australia has borrowed quite heavily from my blog the other day on IKEA, so I hope they won’t mind if I borrow back from their rather good blog on the same theme. As they say:

The advance guard of the crowd heading for Sunday’s rugby league grand final might have wondered what the traffic jam was about on Homebush Drive heading away from Olympic Park - the queue was to get into the car park for IKEA’s massive headquarters store. This wasn’t an opening special, there was no spring sale, not even...

IKEA is a private company. It does not need to publish an annual financial statement ion the form as a quoted multinational corporation. And it doesn’t. But it has (I think for the first time) published a limited annual report. That’s the good news. The bad news is it does not tell us much. This is the profit and loss account:

I’ve just blogged a letter sent to the FT by some of the leaders of the UK’s financial services industry in which they say:

If the only question is, “Is it legal and profitable?”, then all that matters is that what is done complies with the regulations in force and makes a profit for the seller and the institution they represent. At its most extreme this philosophy undermines any concern for the best interests of the customer, and subordinates these entirely to the pure self-interest of the seller in maximising profit as...