Financial Transparency Coalition

This blog post is the first in a two-part blog series. In this post, I observe several of the year’s biggest global trends and their relationship to financial transparency. In the second post, I will examine this year’s progress and momentum in global policy on transparency issues. Rising Income Inequality In the United States, policymakers across the political spectrum have become increasingly vocal about the rising income inequality. They include Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who called this the “issue of our time,” Senator Paul Rand (R- KY) who admitted income inequality is a problem, and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and...

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS for short, recently became the world’s wealthiest terrorist organizations. In fact, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, according to the International Business Times, ISIS may have more cash than the gross domestic product of several small countries including Gibraltar, the Virgin Islands, and Palau. ISIS has achieved this feat in a relatively short time span. Over the last few years, ISIS has made a lot of money in some traditional avenues: mainly through activities like plundering, pillaging, and extortion. ISIS has also gained controlled several...

While we still have a long way to go, the last decade has made it much harder for terrorists to hide money from authorities.  About fifteen years ago, an article in the Washington Post argued Osama bin Laden was able to “shroud his finances in such secrecy and with so many front companies that American officials acknowledge it could take years to decipher them.”  At the time, U.S. officials understood that the key to bin Laden’s power was his extensive wealth.  Yet they were stymied in their ability to track his or other terrorists’ resources as they did not have...

WASHINGTON, DC – The FACT Coalition will host a joint press conference on Tuesday, July 17th following the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s hearing “U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History.”