Financial Transparency Coalition

Jesse Drucker at Bloomberg is on form again. This time, it's a startler: Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion U.S. Revenue Lost to Tax Loopholes. (Note: TJN just wrote about Martin Sullivan explaining how Microsoft has shielded billions from U.S. taxation.) In each case, it is this trick of transfer pricing (or mispricing) being used to shift profits around the world, in order that profits are realised in the low-tax or zero-tax jurisdictions, while the losses are shifted to the "onshore" higher tax countries, where they can be heaped (in the form...

Small Swiss private banks face tougher times than their larger rivals as they derive less business from emerging markets and will suffer more from rising regulatory costs, according to a consultancy report.

Sanctions are penalties imposed by a single country—or a group of countries—on a state which has taken a troublesome economic or political action. They can be economic, for example bans on exports, or they can be financial, which often bar banks from maintaining accounts in the offending country. Trade sanctions, which are often rooted in economics and not politics, include import duties, tariffs, and import or export quotas. The idea behind these restrictions is that a sanction will cause economic harm to the recipient, thereby pressuring that country into compiling with international or bilateral will. ...

US multinational companies are clamouring for a tax holiday to repatriate billions of dollars “trapped” overseas but are being rebuffed by Barack Obama’s administration.