Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – Comparable to the dogged pursuit of Al Capone by Eliot Ness, “Chasing Madoff” is the compelling story of Harry Markopolos and his team of investigator's ten-year struggle to expose the truth behind the infamous Bernie Madoff scandal. Over the course of a decade, Markopolos pieced together a chain of white-collar crooks including international bankers, lieutenants, and henchmen, linked to Madoff’s devestating Ponzi scheme. As the investigation deepened, the danger posed to Markopolis and his team grew. Finding himself trapped in a web of deceit and intimidation, the once unassuming Boston securities analyst turned vigilante investigator...

Two years ago an edition of Tax Justice Focus contained a lead article entitled Shadow Regulation and the Shadow Banking System: the role of the Dublin International Financial Services Centre. Written by Jim Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Trinity College, Dublin, it looked at the role in the global financial crisis played by the tax haven / secrecy jurisdiction of Ireland, and in particular the Dublin International Financial Services Centre (IFSC.) We added this to our Economic Crisis + Offshore webpage. Now we have just added to that same web page a major new article by...

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...

Economics is the art of reading tea leaves while taking refuge behind numbers. This truth appears to be increasingly fashionable in the West as the ‘global’ financial crisis transpires to be a western financial and economic crisis. A recent IMF paper entitled “What Caused the Global Financial Crisis - Evidence on the Drivers of Financial Imbalances 1999 – 2007” is a welcome contribution to the tea leaf reading jamboree. It has been argued that low interest rates in the US were perhaps the most important root cause for the ensuing financial frenzy. This IMF paper does not deny this theory,...