Financial Transparency Coalition

The talk of the week has been about Bono. Specifically, the chatter is over the Global Fund, a massive multilateral organization that provides development aid to poor countries for fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The Fund, which in its lifetime has disbursed about $13 billion to 150 developing countries, is backed by several celebrities, including Bill and Melinda Gates, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, and rock-star Bono. Bono believes in the Fund so fervently that in 2006 he created global brand Product(Red), which partners with major corporations including American Express, Gap, Converse, Starbucks, Apple, Dell and Hallmark. These...

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,...

As the Mail on Sunday reports yesterday:

When Barclays boss Bob Diamond confirmed that the bank had about 300 subsidiaries in tax havens there were gasps of dismay at a Treasury Select Committee hearing earlier this month. Few at the highly charged meeting would have believed such a vast network of offshore companies existed, potentially allowing the bank and its clients to avoid huge sums in tax. They would still be in the dark had MP Chuka Umunna not put the figure to Diamond in the first place. But a Financial Mail investigation can reveal that Barclays’ Byzantine structure is far...

Mexico and Venezuela Lead Region with Most Illicit Outflows The Center for International Policy's (CIP) Global Financial Integrity program (GFI) released a new report this week that estimates the quantity and patterns of illicit financial flows coming out of developing countries. The report, "Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries, 2000-2009," (PDF) finds that approximately $6.5 trillion was removed from the developing world from 2000 through 2008, averaging $725 billion to $810 billion per year. Most notable for Latin America, the new GFI report, authored by Dev Kar and Karly Curcio, places both Mexico...