In Business journalism, half a brain is dangerous

It's always hard to make a positive story out

of the neo-liberal banking crisis of 

2008 to infinity. 

But Reuters is just the bunch of half-wits

to do it. Where others see the destruction

of capitalism, they see cheap loans.

Have they ever tried to get a loan?

banks are not lending to mom and pop

shops.

German taxpayers are being robbed, but

luckily for them, they seem to be happy 

about it, because it's being sold to them 

as Teutonic Superiority. f%&*king rubes!

 

beyond that :

SAVERS ARE F$%&CKED. 

THE FUTURE PUBLIC MONEY OF THE COUNTRY 

IS PLEDGED TO BANKS, 

CUTTING OFF GROWTH FOR REAL COMPANIES 

THAT MANUFACTURE.
MORON

checkit: REUTERS

Analysis - What taxpayer bailouts? Euro crisis saves Germany money

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta pose for photographers after a news conference at the Chancellery in Berlin, April 30, 2013. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

By Jan Strupczewski

BRUSSELS | Thu May 2, 2013 9:12am BST

(Reuters) - Throughout Europe's debt crisis, northern European leaders have often said they will not stand for taxpayers having to fork out for other countries' problems, and the notion of "taxpayer-funded bailouts" has taken root.

Yet despite three-and-a-half years of debt and banking turmoil, with bailouts totalling more than 400 billion euros, northern euro zone taxpayers have not actually lost a cent.

What is more, governments in Germany, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands and France have saved billions of euros thanks to a sharp fall in how much they pay to raise money in financial markets since their borrowing costs have dropped steeply.

But that has not prevented the image taking root in voters' minds of hard working northern Europeans putting money on the line to rescue profligate, work-shy southerners, fuelling resentment and undermining Europe's unity.

In the run up to German elections in September, that resentment is only likely to grow, and Chancellor Angela Merkel, bidding for a third term in office, will have to reaffirm her commitment to protect voters from potential losses.

But the truth remains that German taxpayers, as well as those in Finland, the Netherlands and elsewhere, are no worse off at all, and their finance ministries have racked up savings.

"As an unintentional consequence of the crisis, Finland has benefited enormously," said Martti Salmi, the head of international and EU affairs at Finland's ministry of finance.

"We have not lost a cent so far," he told Reuters. "The same as for Germany very much holds for Finland."

In fact, German officials are well aware of their stronger financing position, the result of a more than two percentage point fall in borrowing costs, even as politicians continue to lament the risks being piled on German taxpayers.

When giving presentations in Germany, Klaus Regling, the German who heads the euro zone's permanent bailout fund, often cites two studies that show that Berlin has reaped substantial savings as an unintended consequence of the crisis.

One study, by German insurance giant Allianz (ALVG.DE), has calculated that Berlin saved 10.2 billion euros in 2010-2012 because of lower borrowing costs, as yields on its 10-year bonds fell from 3.39 percent to 1.18 percent now.

The other study, by Jens Boysen-Hogrefe of the IfW economic institute, suggests that the German federal budget saved 8.6 billion euros in 2011 due to low ECB interest rates and the safe-haven impact of investors putting money into Germany.

Those savings rose to 9.6 billion in 2012 and the safe-haven effect will alone be worth 2 billion in 2013, IfW said.

"If we add up the interest rate advantages gained in the period 2010 to 2012 and those that Germany will benefit from in the years to come, we arrive at cumulative interest relief for the German budget of an estimated 67 billion euros," Allianz said in a paper published last September.

"(That is) enough to slash around 3 percentage points off Germany's government debt ratio," which reaps further saving.

Finland, the Netherlands, Austria and France may not have gained as much as Germany, but have also seen a substantial decline in borrowing costs over the crisis period....

The road to predation: your government wants your money

So, we've recently been discussing how bankocracy
works.
Banks run amok, take over small countries and the
political systems of bigger countries.
The banksters and the Central Banksters can create
fake money and abet theft and charge it to their
political slaves' accounts, but countries have to
use austerity to cut back on their expenditure.

When a small country is taken over, the politicians,
this time, it's a mix of local dupes, bankers and
Brussels Sprockets,

[ficken Sie gut? Brussels installs fornicating machine in Dublin]

will institute a formal sounding body whose main
purpose is to see that the take over of banks,
country, hearts and minds sticks. and to steal some
more money and smooth out liquidity "bumps."
Call it Troika, call it NAMA, call it ECB...
The chin music is the same:

"bad country!"

"bad citizen!"

"you deserve what you get"

"you have to restore your country's pride"

NAMA in Ireland, sounds like Mama, but
it's more Orwellian than Orwell.

checkit: 1
Namawinelake

NAMA threatens injunction against namawinelake blog

April 30, 2013 by namawinelake

Well, the surprise is, it took them so long!

This evening, communication has been received from Hayes Solicitors, acting on behalf of NAMA, threatening that unless a commitment is given not to publish the table referred to in this blogpost, then NAMA will seek “injunctive relief” to prevent such publication. The table referred to in the blogpost on John Fraher’s affidavit purports to show 103 loans with the name of the borrower which in some cases is an individual or group of individuals and in others is a company or business. Each of 103 loans shows “Full due diligence nominal value local currency” and “final acquisition value, euro” or in layman’s terms what appears to be the par value of the loan and the NAMA valuation. Remember NAMA has acquired €74bn of loans at par value and paid 43c in the euro on average, or €32bn in total.

2 Nicholas Shaxson: treasureislands.org

May 02 2013

The capture of tax haven Ireland: “the bankers, hedge funds got virtually everything they wanted”

The Financial Times is carrying an important and fascinating story about the tax haven of Ireland. It focuses on a particular issue which is dear to my heart, and the subject of a whole chapter of Treasure Islands.

This is, at heart, a story about how small financial centres become entirely ‘captured’ by financial services interests, with the deliberate removal of democratic checks and balances and carte blanche given to financial services interests to write laws in secret. This is exactly why I call offshore the ‘smoke-filled room,’ where gentleman arrange the world’s financial affairs over cognac and cigars.

In the ‘Ratchet’ chapter of Treasure Islands I compared Delaware’s Big Bang of 1981 with another episode in the British tax haven of Jersey a decade later, and discovered a remarkable, even astonishing similarity between the two. I would boil that down to three words: the Captured Financial State. And that is exactly, precisely what has happened in tax haven after tax haven. Cyprus, it turns out, was exactly the same: see here (and take a look at this astonishing and telling picture here.) And now the FT is reporting exactly, precisely the same thing in Ireland.

If you had time, a read (or re-read) of the “Ratchet” chapter in Treasure Islands will provide the necssary background. Then take a look at this latest, from the FT, discussing a meeting in November 2011 of top civil servants with top officials from the financial sector, amid painful austerity:

    They met under the auspices of the “Clearing House”, a secretive group of financial industry executives, accountants and public servants formed in 1987 to promote Dublin as a financial hub.

This sentence will ring alarm bells with anyone who’s read the “Ratchet” chapter. But there’s more.

    The participants thrashed out 21 separate taxation and legal incentives sought by the financial industry at the meeting, which took place in room 308 in the prime ministers’ offices.

    . . .

    “The lobbying was done in secret behind closed doors,” says Nessa Childers, an Irish member of the European parliament, who got minutes of the meeting using freedom of information laws last year. “The bankers and hedge fund industry got virtually everything they asked for while the public got hit with a number of austerity measures”.

There you have it. The minutes of the meetings, along with a statement from Childers, are provided by Childers here. The last sentence epitomises the captured financial state. For more details on how Ireland got captured, see this special report for TJN’s Financial Secrecy Index.

Now take a look at what happened in Cyprus. The very same phenomenon, in different form. It’s just the same in Jersey. And in Delaware. And the same, in more diluted forms, in Switzerland, the United States, and the UK.

This is what’s happening, all over the world. Anyone wanting to understand the offshore phenomenon needs to understand: this is what it is all about.

when do-gooder accountants are happy making an objective point

...it'll take 1000 years for the politics of bankocracy
to change. I follow such people on Twitter and
they are close enough to power to know how it
works and yet they don't have any interest in
moving things towards a solution.
They just make clean, clear points when they
know politicians don't follow Twitter and don't
care about anybody unless that person or group
scares them or endangers their political career.

We need people who can do that.

We've been pointing fingers at criminals for
a good 5 years now and nothing. Those who
know how, must act to help things change.
e.g.
Nassim Taleb on Twitter
promised to act to stop economic malfeasance.
Twitter:

Nassim N. Taleb ‏@nntaleb 29 Apr

Moral courage doesn't reside in "doing good" so much 

as in fighting the bad. My moral obligation is to destroy 

econ estblshmnt, and I will.

That's a good start. The right attitude.

Now, here's another slow-moving do-gooder:

Checkit: Tax research
1 

Why Npower’s tax avoidance matters

Posted on April 30 2013

38 Degrees have a way with words, creating short messages that work.

As they say of Npower’s tax avoidance this morning in an email to their supporters:

    This is more sinister than just a spot of clever accounting. Every time a company like Npower avoids paying their fair share, it means one of two things for the rest of us: more cuts or tax rises.

I agree with that.

That is precisely why this matters. This tax avoidance is either an exercise in shifting the burden of tax onto ordinary people or an exercise in cutting the services they need. And either way it’s wholly unacceptable.

2 and again: TAX RESEARCH

[It's been KNOWN about for 60 YEARS! 

Though the INTERNET HAS FORCED THIS, it's not good

enough. It's well past high time to do something.]

The EU’s €1 trillion tax loss

Posted on April 14 2013

According to Reuters:

    Tax dodging causes the European Union to lose around 1 trillion euros of income each year, the president of the European Council said on Friday as he announced that EU leaders would discuss the issue at a summit next month.

    This hemorrhage of tax revenues is equivalent to the entire annual economic output of Spain, and far exceeds a total of about 400 billion euros committed to bailouts of euro zone members Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus in coming years.

    “We must seize the increased political momentum to address this critical problem,” Herman Van Rompuy, who chairs meetings of EU leaders, said in a statement broadcast on the Internet.

    “Tax evasion is unfair to citizens who work hard and pay their share of taxes for society to work. It is unfair to companies that pay their taxes – but find it hard to compete because others don’t.”