Financial Transparency Coalition

This wasn’t meant to happen in the last decade. Money laundering regulation was meant to have stopped the handling of drug cash in the USA. The Patriot Act was meant to have closed down such things. The FATF 49 recommendations were meant to have been in place. But as the Observer reported yesterday, US bank Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, money laundered hundreds of billions for Mexican drug gangs in the USA. And, when the activity was questioned internally from London, the money laundering officer who did so was driven out.

Seventy-Seven Years After the Pecora Commission Released It's Report on the Stock Market Crash of 1929, the U.S. Government Publishes a Familiar Document The National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States has recently published its report on the Financial Crisis. The more than 600 pages of this report are a must-read for all people concerned with the last crisis and the ways to avoid a future one. I will not pretend here that I read the entirety of the document, only the conclusions, - and I did one additional reading… The good thing...

Bob Diamond was before the Treasury Select Committee Tuesday. Chuka Umunna, MP fr Streatham, was one of those questioning him. And as the Daily Mail notes, he tabled some new evidence on the use of tax havens / secrecy jurisdictions by Barclays: I admit I spoke to Chuka’s office about this before the event, suggesting how they might find this data from the annual return forms of the bank.

The initial swell of enthusiasm for microfinance has somewhat subsided recently, as an elegantly simple idea founders on the rocks of reality. Despite the early successes of projects such as Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, billions of people from Dhaka to the Dominican Republic remain shut out of the global financial system. The scarcity of credit available to the world’s poorest is still a significant impediment to ending global poverty. The current crisis in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is a case in point. A rash of defaults- and even suicides- among borrowers have led to...