Financial Transparency Coalition

The New Year is a great time for resolutions. Of course most of these resolutions are made on a personal basis. But resolutions can also be made on a national and international level. So in that spirit, here are five resolutions from the FTC and some of our Coalition members. These reforms and priorities, if

New index reveals UK runs biggest part of global secrecy network TJN’s 2013 Financial Secrecy Index exposes yawning gap between G20 rhetoric and reality Today the Tax Justice Network launches its 2013 Financial Secrecy Index, the biggest ever survey of global financial secrecy. This unique index combines a secrecy score with a weighting to create a ranking of the countries that most actively and aggressively promote secrecy in global finance. Click here for the Financial Secrecy Index. This new edition of the Financial Secrecy Index shows that the United Kingdom is the most important global player in the financial secrecy world. While the...

Nuance can be a challenge for Financial Transparency Coalition issues. To the average citizen or politician, the relationship between banking laws in developed countries and poverty in developing countries is not self-evident. On its face, it’s not obvious that public registries in the United Kingdom have anything to do with corruption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet there are compelling connections between these issues and strong causal relationships between them. Our challenge is to explain why. At the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory, I must say the group of organizations who work on these issues does a phenomenal...

Since Edward Snowden leaked the details of the National Security Administration’s top secret mass surveillance programs, Americans have been talking a lot about the tradeoffs between liberty and security. There are, of course, varying perspectives on the issue. Some, like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) argue the government’s actions in this area threatens to “give us an always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that—hour by hour—chips needlessly away at the liberties and freedoms our Founders established for us.” Others, such as NSA head General Keith Alexander argue the program has permitted the intelligence community to “better connect the dots and learn...