Financial Transparency Coalition

Thanks to an AP report that came out yesterday, we now know of yet another reason shell companies are used to keep information in the shadows, but this one involves a U.S. government agency and a "Cuban Twitter".

In college we studied the so-called “resource curse:” the tragic observation that countries well-endowed with natural resources tend to have slower economic growth and poorer development than those without. I remember, very clearly, that we studied this concept as though it were a truism—a common and (mostly) irreversible reality that just was. This theory has, in fact, been demonstrated very strongly in quantitative terms. According to an analysis of developing countries by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, the more an economy relies on mineral wealth, the lower its growth rate. Of course, in my classes, we also studied the drivers...

Apologies to any of our Twitter followers out there. Apparently the social networking giant is suffering from a system wide outage. According to the Washington Post, Twitter says that they "are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly." We'll continue to post news articles on the website and the blog, so check back here regularly for news updates throughout the day. We'll also try to keep Facebook up to date, although some people are saying that parts of Facebook are down as well. (Update) - The Facebook homepage is working for us, but the pages...