Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – The Greek economy lost US$261 billion to crime, corruption, and tax evasion from 2003-2011, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) Director Raymond Baker told Der Spiegel in an exclusive interview published yesterday in the German news magazine. Interestingly, while Greece experienced heavy illicit outflows for 6 of the first 7 years in that time series, Greece experienced massive inflows of illicit money in 2010 and 2011.

It’s not often that the G20, the summit of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies, is merely a preamble to a European meeting. But this week it is. When the world’s leaders met in Los Cabos, Mexico they had one thing on their mind: Europe. And while the leaders of the G20 had a lot to say about the European debt crisis, the real test, and the real action, will happen in Brussels next week, where we expect the European Council to agree to an action plan. In Mexico, European leaders hinted at how this plan might look: a...

This morning, Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and former top economic advisor to President Obama, wrote that European austerity is holding back economic growth, which is making their sovereign debt problem worse, both in individual countries passing austerity budgets and on a continent-wide basis.

One of the main problems underlying the current crisis in the Eurozone is that the conditions set out in the Maastricht Treaty which lay the economic foundation of the zone are not congruent with the criteria needed to form an optimum currency area. The criteria under the Maastricht Treaty namely are (i) a rate of inflation no more than 1.5 percentage points higher than the average of three EU members with the lowest inflation rates (ii) a ratio of the annual government deficit to GDP not to exceed 3% at the end of the preceding fiscal year or...