Financial Transparency Coalition

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,...

In December 2008, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) published a report entitled Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2002-2006 (referred to as the 2008 IFF report). The 2010 IFF report is an update of the first with the added value of a focus on Asia. This study analyzes outflows from Asia in somewhat greater depth with particular reference to outflows from the top five Asian exporters of illicit capital. In response to several requests for more up-to-date analysis of illicit flows, the present update also estimates the volume and pattern of illicit flows in 2009 based on macroeconomic projections and...

BERLIN—On Friday and Saturday this week (October 22d-23th), the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank governors are due to meet in South Korea. The G20 had raised big expectations at a time when it promised the end of bank secrecy (London, April 2009). At that time, capital markets were reaching their lowest point over several years. Since then, they have partially recovered and the G20 tone has considerably softened. Would we have a correlation between Dow Jones levels and G20 softness? Without going that far, we can only reaffirm that transparency and the fight against corruption still have...

A statement released by Mars Group Kenya, a Kenyan anti-corruption organization, this past week clearly shows an awareness and distaste for the role played by international financial organizations in financing corrupt regimes, as well as an appreciation for recent U.S. action to pressure Kenyan politicians to push for government reform. Pressure from the U.S. came last week in the form of 15 letters from the U.S. government to top Kenyan officials, “warning them of possible travel bans if they did not cooperate in instituting reforms.” While many government officials have come out decisively against the actions...