Financial Transparency Coalition

The powerless have few tools to use against the powerful. Sometimes the powerless are a minority. Sometimes they are a majority. Suffrage, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are tools civilizations have developed to give powerless people more power. But the other side has its own tools, which the powerful use to perpetuate their power. Corruption and nepotism are the most obvious examples. These tools are not only used by theocrats and autocrats. They are used in democracies too, and they erode democratic systems by concentrating power in the hands of a few, depriving the powerless of...

Teodoro Nguema Obiang has controlled Equatorial Guinea since he executed his uncle in a bloody coup d’état in 1979. Equatorial Guinea is a country in Middle Africa on the coast. It is one of the smallest and wealthiest countries in the continent, in large part because it holds Africa’s largest oil reserves. Yet the wealth is extremely concentrated in the hands of the government and the ruling elite. Over 75% of the population lives below $2 per day, 35% of its citizens do not live past the age of 40, and nearly 60% do not...

In a piece titled Dirty Money: Why does the international banking system make it so easy for corruption to flourish?, the People & Power series on Al Jazeera reports on kleptocrats, grand scale corruption, and the ease of channelling dirty money through the secrecy mechanisms of the global financial system, Again, let's drive the point home here, we're talking secrecy - we are not disputing rights to due privacy - we are talking the kind of secrecy that allows criminals and tax cheats to profit with impunity, and to lead privileged...

I am rarely surprised when those who are not economists make egregious economic errors. I am only moderately surprised when those errors are in the Financial Times. I suppose I should get used to it. Here’s a little basic economics. Economists, whether talking about banking or housing, trees or oil, always follow a set of fundamental principals. These include very basic ideas. For example, when conducting cost-benefit analysis, count the entire range of relevant benefits and costs. Say you want to do an economic analysis of a project to build a bridge. You count all the costs—labor, materials, etc.—and all...