Financial Transparency Coalition

There’s been a lot of speculation about what secrets Mitt Romney is hiding in his tax returns. The economist in me feels fairly certain that, given the immense damage this issue has done to his presidential bid and assuming the campaign has done a cost-benefit analysis, there must be something pretty shocking lurking below the surface. We already know Mitt Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 Cayman Island funds and another investment, worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as domiciled in the Caymans. Some have argued we should ignore...

Senator Carl Levin (aka “Watchdog of America”) is at it again. Yesterday morning the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Senator Levin (D-MI) chairs, held a hearing to investigate HSBC, the UK-based bank and Europe’s largest financial institution, which has allegedly systematically (and knowingly) lapsed its anti-money laundering systems and allowed suspicious transactions into the United States. According to the subcommittee’s investigative report released Monday, HSBC systematically ignored warnings and failed to stop illegal behavior many times between 2001 and 2010. The report found HSBC accepted deposits intoU.S. branches from Mexican drug cartels, Saudi Arabian banks with terrorist ties,...

Remember the scene in Office Space when Peter, Michael, and Samir accidentally steal $300,000? They realize they can’t give it back without admitting they stole it in the first place, so they think the only way out is to keep the cash and launder the funds. But three law abiding guys don’t really know how to launder money,, so they try looking up “money laundering” in the dictionary, hoping for a clue of how to do it. They don’t find an answer and give up on the idea. Bu then again, the dictionary doesn’t exactly give you a step by...

Everyone knows athletes cheat. Cheating has existed for as long as sports themselves. During the ancient Olympic Games in Greece, officials placed pedestals inscribed with athletes’ names at the entrance of the stadium. The names were not of great athletes, but of those who violated the rules of the Games, in order to punish them into perpetuity. In today’s version of public dishonor, our media nationally broadcasts the names and crimes of steroid-injecting baseball players, blood-doping cyclists, and plotting figure-skaters. Not all athletes cheat—even those who have the opportunity to. I would know. For three years, I lived at the...