Financial Transparency Coalition

In the game Jenga, players take turns removing blocks from a tower and balancing them on top, creating a progressively taller, but also increasingly more unstable, structure as the game goes on. The gig is up when a player pulls out a final block and the whole structure collapses with a clatter of wooden bricks and screams of surprise. While the comparison is slightly simplistic, there are numerous ways that Jenga is just like the world’s current economic crisis. In the last few years, there have been many developments which in retrospect look like small blocks being pulled...

As the Tax Justice Network notes:

Tucked away low down in an article in the August edition of the Swiss review, there is this:

“Switzerland has become a paradise for foreign capital on which tax is not paid. The uproar from foreign governments is understandable.”

These are not the words of a critic of the banks, but of private banker Konrad Hummler. He says that around 30%, or CHF 1,000 billion, of the CHF 2,800 billion or so of foreign assets in Swiss banks is untaxed “black money”.

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No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. Cayman is insolvent, bust, broke, unable to pay its debts. This is not a rumour, this is fact. This fact is confirmed by the speaking notes used by the Hon. McKeeva Bush for a meeting held with senior Cayman civil servants, government boards and private sector business leaders last Thursday, of which I seemed to be the first to secure a copy. The text is here, but I will also reproduce it separately on my blog in case Cayman take it down. The following summarises the current state of play,...

WASHINGTON — A deal with Switzerland settling U.S. demands for the names of suspected tax dodgers from a Swiss bank has a lot of wealthy Americans with offshore accounts nervously running to their tax advisers — and the Internal Revenue Service.