Financial Transparency Coalition

More than a billion people across the world will go to bed hungry on Saturday, the day the United Nations has designated World Food Day. The growing food crisis, which is leaving millions of people without enough to eat, has inequality at its root. Most markets have plenty of food, yet the price has risen beyond the reach of ordinary people. This income disparity is particularly stark in Latin America and the Caribbean, recently labelled the most unequal region in the world. Ten of the 15 most unequal countries in the world are in that region,...

A Harvard Business School report lat year noted:

This study investigates whether private equity (PE) firms influence the tax practices of their portfolio firms. Prior research documents that PE firms create economic value in portfolio firms through effective governance, financial, and operational engineering. Given PE firms’ focus on value creation, we examine whether PE firms influence the extent and types of tax avoidance at portfolio firms as an additional source of economic value. We document that PE-backed portfolio firms engage in significantly more nonconforming tax planning and have lower marginal...

There’s been a lot of chatter about the yuan lately. Well, honestly there’s been a lot of chatter about the yuan for a lot of years. For over a decade, China pegged the yuan, which is the basic unit of the Chinese currency called the renminbi (yes—confusing), to the U.S. dollar. The Chinese government sets its ideal exchange rate by buying foreign exchange with yuan, thereby increasing the number of yuan per dollars in the global market. This keeps the ratio of yuan to dollars high, which means the exchange rate is artificially low (again—confusing—no...

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the government’s financial intelligence center, is giving mutual funds more time to implement new anti-money laundering and reporting requirements under the Bank Secrecy Act.