Trillions hidden in offshore accounts

E estamos no jogo: Os espanhois não conseguem jogar, o Porto domina a bola, passe atrás de passe, é só descer a baliza, não tem tido muita sorte, os remates saem ao lado, parece que o defesa do Porto está fora de jogo, o juiz da linha está a vê-lo, de repente o jogador sobe até aos espanhois, já não está em posição irregular, do outrol lado do campo, alguém desce de repente, à boca da baliza, passa a abola de um lado ao outro, remata, Golo! Jogada duvidosa dizem os espanhois...

Preto está calmamente no camarote, não sabe que vamos para as Competições europeias. Vamos para a Suiça, onde os euros são congelados, e não vem na Imprensa:

More than half the world‘s money passes almost undetected through a series of financial black holes that shelter it from not only the tax collector but from shareholders, partners and wives, a Tribune-Review investigation found.

Once employed by gangsters such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, these secret bank accounts have grown so vast and lawless that some experts tell the Trib they fear the amount of money involved threatens societies from China to Africa, Europe and the United States. World leaders railed against the impact of secret havens during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh three years ago.

“They have caused a huge imbalance in the market,” said John Christensen, director of London-based Tax Justice Network, which was established by the British Parliament in 2003 to examine tax issues worldwide.

“They are the very opposite of capitalism, which is supposed to be based on transparency. They are the shadow economy.”

From Switzerland and a couple of Caribbean islands, the black holes are in 70 or more countries. Christensen said studies by several organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, put the total stash at as much as $25 trillion.

In contrast, the Commerce Department pegs the gross national product of the United States at more than $15 trillion.

The black holes emit no light, according to organizations that study them, including the IRS. They hide owners and assets. Officers and directors are strawmen. Host countries get little, if any, taxes and earn fees mostly by promising to keep everyone in the dark. Few public records exist.

Owners revealed by accident typically are corporations in other black holes halfway across the world.

Though tax evasion and avoidance are only part of the reason for the shadow economy, they play a role. Tax losses to the United States amount to $1 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. That‘s the amount congressional leaders tried to cut in last summer‘s deficit showdown.

Across Europe, experts say tax dodgers undermine economies in places such as Greece and Spain, threatening the euro as a whole.

It isn‘t just tax dodgers or “old money” in New York or London who use the accounts. New players have caught on.

For every $1 that Western companies invest in China, a Trib analysis found, the Chinese hide $4 offshore.

From 2000 to 2009, that net illicit outflow totaled $2.74 trillion, according to Global Financial Integrity, which champions tax reform in the developing world.

“Corruption in China dwarfs the rest of the world,” Global Financial spokesman Clark Gascoigne said. “The economists here are very pessimistic about China‘s long-term prospects.”

James Henry, owner of the Sag Harbor Group in New York, an international business consulting agency, said he disagrees with the methodology that Global Financial uses to reach its figure, but agrees that there is significant capital flight from China. He said at least half of world funds pass through shadow jurisdictions, at least on paper.

China soon will see the effects of corruption in the failure of infrastructure the Communist Party built during the past decade, said Sarah Freitas, one of the economists who wrote the Global Financial report.

Until then, the Chinese appear determined to shovel their newfound wealth out of the country. A 2011 study by China Merchants Bank and Bain & Co. found that nearly 60 percent of wealthy Chinese have or will invest overseas.

The British Virgin Islands is a favorite haven. The islands‘ 30,000 people host more than 400,000 corporations – at least 13 for each resident.

A SIMPLE, SHADY PROCESS

Offshore accounts can hide wealth and disguise losses. Enron Corp. used off-shore accounts to hide weakness in its balance sheet, records show.

The shadow economy reaches virtually every place on Earth.

Western Pennsylvania companies have more than 300 subsidiaries in countries that federal researchers deemed to be “financial privacy jurisdictions,” such as the Cayman Islands, Singapore and the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. Nationwide, doctors set up Caribbean island accounts to hide assets in case of malpractice suits.

Anyone with an Internet connection could, for example, create a company in the Indian Ocean nation of Mauritius that would control a shell company in Wyoming and be run by a trustee in the Central American country of Belize.

Because it can be done so easily for just a few hundred dollars, a husband sitting at home could hide nearly all of a couple‘s money before driving to a courthouse to file for divorce.

‘STEP AHEAD OF THE SHERIFF‘

Americans who hide money illegally in foreign accounts cost the United States up to $70 billion a year, the Congressional Research Service reports.

David Alan, a Greene County optometrist, set up accounts in the Bahamas and the Caribbean island of Nevis to avoid income taxes. He claimed just $38 in income – and $4 in federal taxes – for a year when actual amounts were $242,740 in income and $66,898 in taxes, prosecutors said. Alan went to federal prison in October after a former employee reported him to the IRS.

“It‘s a blatant defiance of the tax law,” said Sybil Smith, acting special agent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division at Pittsburgh‘s IRS office. “It shifts the tax burden to innocent taxpayers, and is that fair?”

Efforts to sweep up tax cheats largely have foundered. Since 2009 and the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, world leaders have stepped up enforcement but dodgers have moved money to more obscure hideouts.

Evasion was the tack followed by a Pittsburgh couple who opened a secret Swiss account in the 1960s. Because their bank was compelled to turn over account information in response to a U.S. indictment, the couple moved their money to a smaller, private Swiss bank and then to another. Finally, one of their grown children talked with Swiss bankers about coming clean to the IRS. U.S. prosecutors now are using the family to go after the bankers.

In all, more than 33,000 Americans voluntarily came forward in 2009, 2011 and this year to disclose $5 billion held in secret foreign accounts, the IRS said last month. No one knows how much remains hidden.

Rules that take effect in 2014 under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act require foreign banks to report holdings by Americans or be subject to a 30 percent withholding tax on money leaving the United States.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has led the international effort to bring havens into compliance with information-sharing agreements about hidden bank accounts. Still, the group cannot estimate how much money remains hidden, according to Monica Bhatia, head of the OECD‘s Global Forum on Transparency.

“It‘s a work in progress,” she said. “As we progress, we‘re making life more and more difficult for people to hide money anywhere.”

Nations that benefit from taxes and bank fees on offshore accounts have no self-interest in helping developed countries track down hidden money, said Robert Kudrle, a professor at the University of Minnesota. “Nobody really wants to do anything, other than stay one step ahead of the sheriff.”

COUNTRIES PAY HIGH COST

Though the numbers are “squishy,” corporations using mostly legal tax dodges through subsidiaries in offshore financial havens cost the United States $60 billion a year, said Jane Gravelle, a researcher with the Congressional Research Service.

Offshoring combined with transfer pricing – in which profits are shifted to low- or no-tax jurisdictions – plays a big role, the service reports.

U.S. companies hold $22 trillion abroad, according to a Commerce Department annual survey, and much of it pools in places known for low taxes and tight secrecy: $1.25 trillion is in Luxembourg and Mauritius holds $34 billion.

Even when companies say they are using legal means to avoid paying taxes, it can lead to disputes.

Drug company Merck paid $2.3 billion in back taxes and penalties as part of a 2007 agreement with the IRS; GlaxoSmithKline paid the feds $3.4 billion in back taxes and fines a year earlier because of a transfer pricing dispute.

Lawmakers could close legal loopholes but don‘t, said Dhammika Dharmapala, an economist at the University of Illinois College of Law and an expert on corporate tax havens.

“It should be a no-brainer,” said Joseph Stead, senior economic justice adviser for Christian Aid, a British charity that tracks lost taxes in developing countries. “You have governments all over the world in desperate need of revenues at the minute, and this would help them track it down. And yet they‘re not.”

SECRECY FIRST

Tax evasion no longer is the lead motivation for much of the money flowing into the shadow economy. Often, people simply want to hide what they have — either from law enforcement or lawsuits.

Websites offer to help small business owners protect assets from potential litigants and tell divorcees how to keep their former spouses from touching their assets. Money flowing from other countries ends up in states such as Wyoming, Nevada and Delaware with low reporting requirements.

Corruption, kickbacks, bribery and illicit trade pricing throughout developing countries accounted for most of the $8.4 trillion siphoned out in the century‘s first decade, according to Global Financial.

In developing countries, the amount of money leaking out often equals or exceeds aid flowing in, Stead and other experts said. Fixing that problem could reduce dependence on foreign aid.

Ethiopia‘s 94 million people are among the world‘s poorest, with per capita income of about $1,000 by CIA estimates. The country received $829 million in development assistance in 2009.

The Global Financial analysis found that the Ethiopian elite transferred $3.26 billion out of the country that year. The impact of that lost bounty, it said, is clear: “The people of Ethiopia are being bled dry.”

———

Editor‘s note: This story is one in a series on hidden money.

Lou Kilzer and Andrew Conte are staff writers for Trib Total Media. Kilzer can be reached at 412-380-5628 or lkilzer@tribweb.com. Conte can be reached at 412-320-7835 or andrewconte@tribweb.com.

Read more: http://triblive.com/news/2126360-74/tax-money-accounts-taxes-countries-financial-hide-billion-china-global#ixzz2Hwks4duq 
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PRETO ESCARUMBA, FILHO DA PUTA, CÃO (FOTOGRAFEM A SEGURANÇA DESTA PRETALHADA, NÓS ESTAMOS A CHEGAR!)

PRETO ESCARUMBA FILHO DA PUTA

QUE GRANDE TRISTEZA! QUE ÓDIO!

Eu sei que não costumam acompanhar o meu facebook, e portanto quando eu disser 2pessoal da rádio frequência" vocês não vão perceber.

Mas mesmo que não percebam, fiquem-se com esta história:

um amigo meu, vendia carros, não consegue vender há mais de 14 meses, nem único carro, hoje está com uma dor de dentes tão brutal, tão grande, sem dinheiro para o dentista, que não existem nos Hospitais, que foi á Urgência pedir analgésicos. Só lhe deram 2 comprimidos. Não tem dinheiro para comprar rigorosamente nem uma única caixa de anti-inflamatório. estava tão endoidecido com as dores, que tentou arrancar o dente sozinho, ficou com uma hemorragia, mas que também não tratam no Hospital. A família que já não o pode ver de tanto "emprestadado" lá lhe emprestou 15 euros, porque eu disse-lhe que havia uma dentista em Queluz que tirava dentes particularmente por esse preço, e ela só demora 10 minutos a aviar centenas de pessoas ao dia.

No café, uma rapariga que trabalha na boutique fina, onde só vão pretas cheias de dinheiro, contou-me que outro dia chegou lá uma Sra, que lhes pediu que lhes comprassem 3 laranjas e 3 tangerinas, que ela tinha roubado, porque ela e a filha já não comiam há 4 dias.

Até quando?

Romeo Dallaire, a Wikipedia diz que é "agente humanitário"

Este Sr. General francês foi para o Rwanda com os capacetes azuis, estabelecer a Paz, certo? estavam lá duas seitas de pretos, ús cocuanas e os kzuanas a matarem-se todos. dois dias de lá ter chegado, ou atingiram um soldado francês, talvez, ou o General "passou-se" dos cornos com a catinga, manda abrir fogo!! Quando a francepress lá chegou, eram quilómetros e quilómetros de macacos pelas estradas fora, todos mortos.

Depois esta merda foi para o conselho de segurança da ONU, e a Madelein Albright começa a dar na cabeça aos franceses. Os russos estavam calados, os chineses calados estavam, os japoneses liam o jornal, os ingleses calados, e os americanos todos fodidos por não lhes terem perguntado nada.

Entretanto, os franceses foram obrigados a dar nas orelhas do General, e ele respondeu á Imprensa francesa: Eu quero bem é que vocês se fodam! estabeleci a Paz! Não me chateiem nunca mais!" E até hoje.

Na Wikipedia, lá vem o General Dalloire, como "agente humanitário"

Eis o texto da Amnistia Internacional:

Gen. Romeo Dallaire defied U.N. orders to withdraw from Rwanda. Without the authority, manpower, or equipment to stop the slaughter, he saved the lives he could but nearly lost his sanity.

***

In an indifferent world, Gen. Romeo Dallaire and a few thousand ill-equipped U.N. peacekeepers were all that stood between Rwandans and genocide. The Canadian commander did what he could-did more than anyone else-but he sees his mission as a terrible failure and counts himself among its casualties.

After a 100-day reign of terror, some 800,000 Rwandan civilians were dead, most killed by their machete-wielding neighbors. Dallaire had sounded the alarm. He'd begged. He'd bellowed. He'd even disobeyed orders. "l was ordered to withdraw...by [then-U.N. Sec. Gen. Boutros] Boutros Ghali about seven, eight days into it. .. and I said to him, 'I can't, I've got thousands' -by then we had over 20,000 people-'in areas under our control,"' Dallaire said in a recent interview with Amnesty Now. The general's hands, always moving, rose beside his face as if to block the memories. "The situation was going to shit....And, I said, 'No, I can't leave."'

The U.N. had sent Dallaire and 2,600 troops, mainly from Bangladesh and Ghana, to Rwanda to oversee a peace accord between the region's two main groups, Hutus and Tutsis. But on April 6,1994, eight months after the peacekeepers arrived, a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, both Hutus, was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Hutu-controlled radio blamed the Tutsis and immediately began calling for their extermination, as well as for the murder of moderate Hutus considered friendly to the Tutsi "cockroaches." The broadcasts gave details on whom to kill and where to find them.

Dallaire and his troops were about to become spectators to genocide. As bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N. mandate that didn't even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt.

The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500 per flight-hour.

Dallaire's pain is palpable as he remembers his yearlong mission. His words, raw as a wound, make a grim contrast to the carefully parsed regrets of the world leaders who actually had the power to stop the genocide but turned away. He has just spoken at an Amnesty-sponsored conference in Atlanta on law and human rights, and he looks tired- older than his 56 years. His eyes are close set, raptor-like, but his gaze is warm and direct. "When you're in command, you are in command," he says. "There's 800,000 gone, the mission turned into catastrophe, and you're in command. I feel I did not convince my superiors and the international community," he says. "I didn't have enough of the skills to be able to influence that portion of the problem."

Three days after the Rwandan killings began, with Dallaire's troops running short of rations as well as ammunition, about l,000 European troops arrived in Kigali. The general watched with frustration as the well-armed, well-fed Westerners landed and left again as soon as they'd evacuated their own nationals. Then, after Hutu militias killed ~o Belgian paratroopers, Brussels withdrew all of its peacekeepers (the only significant Western contingent and the only one that was properly equipped) from the U.N. mission. Dallaire's depleted force was on its own.

Even as the already desperate situation worsened, Washington called for a complete withdrawal of peacekeepers. On April 21, after international pressure, the U.S. agreed to a limited force and supported a Security Council resolution slashing the force to 270 peacekeepers. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright accurately described the tiny force as enough "to show the will of the international community."

Remarkably, with scant resources-indeed, with only one satellite telephone for the whole mission-Dallaire was able to maintain safe areas for those 20,000 terrorized Rwandans. But he could do little else, and the killing continued.

Eight years later, in daylight and in dreams, Dallaire still hears the cries of wounded children, the weeping of survivors, the voice of the man who died at the other end of a phone line as the general listened. He still can't escape the smell of death, the memories of hacked-off limbs scattered on the ground, and worst of all, he says, the "thousands upon thousands of sets of eyes in the night, in the dark, just floating and looking back" at him in anger, accusation, or eternal pleading.

With counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, and a handful of pills a day, he is working to use his experiences to prevent another Rwanda. But the baleful ghosts remain, and the book he is writing about the slaughter is rousing them. "As I go over what I have written," he says, "more and more I see lost opportunities; more and more I see errors because of lack of intelligence or simply from mis-assessing a situation. I'd take a decision on the phone, and people would die within seconds. I was getting pressure from everybody not to use my soldiers." His voice fades to a whisper . "It's horrific because every day decisions were taken on life and death. Every day. Real people, real people."

We are sitting in a dark taxi and I can't see his face. He maybe remembering when the Belgian senate blamed him "at least partially" for the deaths of its paratroopers. Or he may be listening to his Rwandan voices. As we near his hotel, he says, "l always have people with me. Like tonight, I'll ask the guys at the desk to just check on me because I'm not supposed to be alone because it can go to extremes."

Dallaire says that about 20 percent of troops and humanitarian workers on missions like his suffer much the same thing, as do 5 to 10 percent of diplomats. "They are casualties," he tells me. "High suicide rates, booze, drugs, pornography, finding themselves on skid row."

When Dallaire returned to Canada from Rwanda, he tried to drink himself into a stupor of forgetfulness. He raged at his family. He tried to kill himself In 2000 a few months after he was medically released from the Canadian Forces, he was found passed out drunk under a park bench in Hull, Quebec. "He was curled up in a ball," photographer Stephane Beaudoin, alerted by a police report, later told the Ottawa Citizen. "I never took a photo. I felt sad for him. I thought, 'This man has done so much for us. How did he come to be here?"'

Dallaire's reluctance to give himself credit for what he managed to accomplish certainly contributed to his breakdown. Asked directly, he admits saving people, "sometimes by the thousands, you know, just by giving appropriate orders to my troops." Past and present merge as Dallaire remembers one day when he, his driver, and aide-de-camp "were making our way through a large population move in the hills. It was raining and cold because it's fairly high up. And there this woman was, right there by the road, and people are walking around her, and she is giving birth. And so, as we're inching, the child came out. The woman, already emaciated, sort of picked up the child and then fell back. So we jumped out, you know, because nobody was stopping. The mother was dead. We tried to wrap the baby up as best we could, brought it back, and then other people sorted it out."

But Dallaire quickly returns to the people he failed to save and to the limits of his skills. "Thirty years ago when I joined the army, if somebody mentioned human rights, we immediately equated them with communists," Dallaire now says. The former career officer has come to believe that, along with the ability to attack and kill, soldiers must learn peacekeeping, negotiation, and human rights preservation. That belief is reflected in the war stories he chooses to tell. Rather than tales of derring-do, he offers anecdotes that plumb the moral ambiguities of modern soldiering.

"A young officer is entering a village," Dallaire recounts. "The village has been wiped out except for a few women and children still alive [in a ditch filled with bodies]. There is 30 percent AIDS in that area. There is blood all over that place, no rubber gloves. Does the platoon commander order his troops to get in there, into the ditch risking AIDS, and help?" The question, it turns out, is not an exercise in armchair ethics. "When I asked the platoon commanders, those from 23 of the 26 nations that sent forces said they would order their troops to keep marching. Commanders from three nations- Holland, Ghana, and Canada-were saved the complexity of the question because by the time they turned around their troops were already in the ditch."

Dallaire continues, his hands alive, his eyes still, the Gallic-tinted accent of his native Quebec growing more pronounced. "Or a soldier is watching two girls, 13 or 14, both with children on their backs, with a crowd spurring on the one with a machete to kill the other girl because she is different. What does the soldier do? Shoot the girl with the machete, possibly killing her baby? Shoot into the crowd? Do nothing?"

"Should I myself," he asks, "negotiate with a militia commander with gore on his shirt and his hands from the morning's work, making a joke, to get him to withdraw his gang so I can move thousands of people [to safety] Or do I pull out my pistol and shoot him between the eyes?"

"The corporal," says; Dallaire, returning to the soldier watching the machete-wielding girl, "tried to negotiate his away through the crowd to stop the attack but headquarters in his home country ordered him not to intervene. That corporal is now an injured ex-corporal," Dallaire says, and like the ex-general himself, a casualty of post-traumatic stress.

For all the blame he heaps on himself, Dallaire also faults the strictures that bound him in 1994 and that will have to change if the world is to avoid another Rwanda. The institution of peacekeeping missions, he says, is deeply flawed. Even if he had received the political and humanitarian training the job demanded, the U.N.'s rules would have robbed him of the ability to use his military skills. With thousands of civilians begging for protection as they were hunted down in their homes and churches,

"I could tell [the peacekeepers] to do things," he says, "but they would check with their country. The troops are under my operational command, but they remained under the ultimate command of their nations, so. . . if a national capital feels that a [rescue] mission is unwarranted, or too risky, or something, the soldiers can turn around and say, 'No, I can't do it."'

Asked to name one of the countries that ordered its soldiers not to move injured Rwandans to safe areas, even when Dallaire told them to, the general hesitates for a long time before saying, "Bangladesh." It was the Ghanaians, he adds, who performed most humanely.

With the exception of the Red Cross, the non-governmental organizations were clueless, Dallaire says. "When they started sending people in, they kept sending me assessment teams. Assessment teams! 'Listen, I don't need a goddamn assessment team. I need food, medical supplies, water for 2 million people, and I've got to feed them twice a day. Get the shit in here. We'll sort out the distribution.' "

If Dallaire's anger at those who did too little is fierce, his fury at world leaders who feigned ignorance and did nothing is white hot. He cannot forget, for example, that President Clinton stopped for a few hours in Kigali in 1998, after it was all over, and with the engines of Air Force One running, said he was sorry; he didn't know.

Or that David Rawson, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda at the time of the mass murders, waited a month before declaring a "state of disaster," and then dismissed the slaughter as "tribal killings." Calling what happened in Rwanda "tribal" conflict made intervention seem futile. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, who had pushed hard for the U.S. to "neutralize" Hutu hate radio, later explained to author Samantha Power, "What I was told was, 'Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time."'

The designation of "tribal" conflict also nicely avoided the word "genocide." Had a major power or the U.N. invoked that term in time, all states that were signatories of the 1948 convention on genocide would have been obliged to condemn the slaughter and act to stop it.

Avoiding the word did not however avoid the fact. "They knew how many people were dying," Dallaire says, no matter what word they used. "The world is racist," he says bitterly. ,' "Africans don't count; Yugoslavians do. More people were killed, injured, internally displaced, and refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than in the whole eight to nine years of the Yugoslavia campaign," he says, and there are still peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia while Rwanda is again off the radar. f "Why didn't the world react to scenes where women were held as shields so nobody could shoot back while the militia shot into the | crowd?" he asks. "Where... boys were drugged up and turned into child soldiers, slaughtering families?...Where girls and women were systematically raped before they were killed? Babies ripped out of their stomachs? ...Why didn't the world come?"

Dallaire supplies his own answer: "Because there was no self-interest....No oil. They didn't come because some humans are [considered] less human than others."

Nonetheless, Dallaire still calls himself an optimist. Despite its troubles, he believes that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which operates out of Arusha, Tanzania, "is one of those great potential instruments of the future." His own job, he says, won't be done until the tribunal finishes its investigation. "My duty as force commander who ultimately became head of mission will not end until the Arusha Tribunal says it doesn't need me to testify anymore, or when the tribunal decides to hold me accountable."

There is virtually no chance the international court will blame him. The question is whether he'll one day stop blaming himself. "The work I'm doing helps," he says, referring to his campaign to stop the use of children as soldiers. Counseling seems to be helping, too.

"One day after a couple hours of therapy," he says, "we're sitting there, and, you know, to-ing and fro-ing. I all of a sudden felt joy in my stomach. You know when you feel happy in your tummy? And I had not felt that in the seven years since Rwanda. All of a sudden I said, 'jeez, I feel, I feel better."' Dallaire stopped, tilted his head as if to listen to his own words and broke into a smile as sweet as warm winter sun. "My therapist let me savor that-and then we talked. And at the end of it, I said, I think I have moved from survival to living. And maybe to getting better."

The world, he knows, has not. Without the political will and institutional mechanisms to stop it, "Rwanda" will happen again.

 

PORTUGAL'S PM AND HIS CHIMPANZE FAMILIY, 3 BLACK MONKEYS AND AN' ALBINE SLEEPING AT S.BENTO

No recovery until 2018, IMF warns

The International Monetary Fund's chief economist has warned that theglobal economy will take a decade to recover from the financial crisis as the latest snapshot of the UK economy suggested that growth in the third quarter will be at best anaemic.

Olivier Blanchard said he feared the eurozone crisis, debt problems in Japan and the US, and a slowdown in China meant that the world economy would not be in good shape until at least 2018. "It's not yet a lost decade," he said. "But it will surely take at least a decade from the beginning of the crisis for the world economy to get back to decent shape.

Blanchard made his comments on a Hungarian website Portfolio.hu ahead of the IMF meeting next week in Tokyo. Germany is expected to defend its handling of Europe's debt problems at the meeting, but Blanchard said there was more that Europe's largest economy could do to support Spain and other struggling eurozone nations. In particular, he urged Berlin to accept a rise in inflation and wages that would make it less competitive with its trading partners.

He said there was no risk of hyperinflation in Europe. Higher inflation in Germany, though, would be beneficial: a somewhat higher inflation rate in Germany should simply be seen as a necessary and desirable relative price adjustment, he said.

Blanchard's comments came as figures from Markit showed that the UK's important services sector grew in August but slipped back by September as the Olympics factor waned.

According to industry figures from Markit the services activity index dropped from 53.7 to 52.2 and employment fell, adding to gloomy surveys of the construction and manufacturing sectors earlier in the week.

Markit, which compiles a monthly index based on figures from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, said it was now clear that the bounce back from the slump in the first half of the year was weaker than expected and could result in the UK economy growing by just 0.1% in the third quarter.

Hopes that the Queen's diamond jubilee and the £9bn spent on the Olympics would lift sales over the longer term have largely been dashed as growth slows and the outlook, though robust with a growing order book, remains subdued.

The Bank of England's monetary policy committee, which began a two-day meeting on Wednesday, is on Thursday expected to keep interest rates at 0.5% and maintain the stock of bonds in its quantitative easing programme at £375bn.

Most economists believe it is possible the lacklustre figures will persuade the MPC to add a further £50bn at its November meeting when the first estimate of the third quarter figures is available.

India is set to become the eighth largest shareholder in the IMF after quota reforms which are likely to be finalised at the multilateral agency's Annual Meeting at Tokyo in October.
Once the quota reforms are carried out, India's share at IMF is set to rise to 2.75% from 2.44%, making it the eighth largest shareholder in the multilateral agency from its present 11th position.

"The quota reforms at the IMF are likely in October at the Annual Meetings of IMF andWorld bank in Tokyo," a Finance Ministryofficial told PTI.

Last week Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had announced that India would contribute $10 billion to the IMF's $430 billion bailout fund for the euro-zone.

India's contribution was part of a pledge by the G20 nations made in April to supply the IMF with extra firepower.

The implementation of the quota reforms has been delayed as countries such as the US have not yet ratified the proposal.

The issue of quota reforms came up for discussion at the recent G20 summit at Los Cabos and the world leaders had underlined the need for expeditious completion of the quota reforms to give more say to emerging economies.

"The masses... do not conceive any ideas, sound or unsound. They only choose between the ideologies developed by the intellectual leaders of mankind. But their choice is final and determines the course of events. If they prefer bad doctrines, nothing can prevent disaster." Keynes a Progressive Racist

The theory of output as a whole, which is what The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state. 

John Maynard Keynes 

In looking at and assessing the economic paradigm of John Maynard Keynes — a man himself fixated on aggregates — we must look at the aggregate of his thought, and the aggregate of his ideology. 

Keynes was not just an economist. Between 1937 and 1944 he served as the head of the Eugenics Society and once called eugenics ”the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.” And Keynes, we should add, understood that economics was a branch of sociology. So let’s be clear: Keynes thought eugenics was more important, more significant, and more genuine than economics. 

Eugenics — or the control of reproduction — is a very old idea. 

In The Republic, Plato advocated that the state should covertly control human reproduction: 

You have in your house hunting-dogs and a number of pedigree cocks. Do not some prove better than the rest? Do you then breed from all indiscriminately, or are you careful to breed from the best? And, again, do you breed from the youngest or the oldest, or, so far as may be, from those in their prime? And if they are not thus bred, you expect, do you not, that your birds and hounds will greatly degenerate? And what of horses and other animals? Is it otherwise with them? How imperative, then, is our need of the highest skill in our rulers, if the principle holds also for mankind? 

The best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and the worst with the worst in the fewest, and that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the flock is to be as perfect as possible. And the way in which all this is brought to pass must be unknown to any but the rulers, if, again, the herd of guardians is to be as free as possible from dissension. 

Certain ingenious lots, then, I suppose, must be devised so that the inferior man at each conjugation may blame chance and not the rulers and on the young men, surely, who excel in war and other pursuits we must bestow honors and prizes, and, in particular, the opportunity of more frequent intercourse with the women, which will at the same time be a plausible pretext for having them beget as many of the children as possible. And the children thus born will be taken over by the officials appointed for this. 

Additionally, Plato advocated “disposing” with the offspring of the inferior: 

The offspring of the inferior, and any of those of the other sort who are born defective, they will properly dispose of in secret, so that no one will know what has become of them. That is the condition of preserving the purity of the guardians’ breed. 

In modernity, the idea appears to have reappeared in the work first of Thomas Malthus, and later that of Francis Galton. 

Malthus noted: 

It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible. As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general. 

Galton extended Malthus’ thoughts: 

What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction. 

Margaret Sanger — the founder of Planned Parenthood — went even further, claiming that the state should prevent the “undeniably feeble-minded” from reproducing, and advocated “exterminating the Negro population”. 

And these ideas — very simply, that the state should determine who should live, and who should die, and who should be allowed to reproduce — came to a head in the devastating eugenics policies of Hitler’s Reich, which removed around eleven million people — mostly Jews, gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals, and anyone who did not fit with the notion of an Aryan future — from the face of the Earth. 

Of course, the biggest problem with eugenics is that human planning cannot really control nature. Mutation and randomness throw salt over the idea. No agency — even today in the era of genetics — has the ability to effectively determine who should and should not breed, and what kind of children they will have. 

As Hayek noted: 

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals. 

Keynes’ interest in this topic appears to have descended from his contempt for the individual, and individual liberty. He once wrote: 

Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. 

The common denominator in all of these examples — and in my view, the thing that brought Keynes toward eugenics — is the belief that the common individual is too stupid to be the captain of his own destiny. Instead, the state — supposedly equipped with the best minds and the best data — should centrally plan. Eugenicists believe that the state should centrally plan human reproduction, while Keynesians believe that the state should centrally engineer recovery from economic malaise through elevated spending. Although it would be unwise to accuse modern Keynesians of having sympathy for eugenics, the factor linking both of these camps together is John Maynard Keynes himself. 

Keynes’ description of an economic depression — that a depression is a fall in the total economic output — is technically correct. And many modern Keynesian economists have made worthwhile contributions — Hyman Minsky, Steve Keen, Michael Hudson, and Joe Stiglitz are four examples . Even the polemicist Paul Krugman’s descriptive work on trade patterns and economic agglomeration is interesting and accurate. 

The trouble seems to begin with prescriptions. Keynesianism dictates that the answer to an economic depression is an increase in state spending. And on the surface of it, an increase in state spending will lift the numbers. But will momentarily lifting the numbers genuinely help the economy? Not necessarily; the state could spend millions of dollars on subsidies for things that nobody wants, wasting time, effort, labour and taxes and thus destroying wealth. 

And the state can push a market into euphoria — just as Alan Greenspan did to the housing market — creating the next bubble and the next bust, requiring an even bigger bailout. State spending creates additional dependency on the state, and perverts the empirical market mechanism — the genuine underlying state of demand in a market economy — which signals to producers what to produce and not produce. Worst of all, centralist policies almost always have knock-on side-effects that no planner could foresee (causality is complicated). 

So Hayek’s view on the insuperable limits to knowledge applies as much to the economic planner as it does to the central planner of human reproduction. 

While eugenicists and Keynesians make correct descriptive observations — like the fact that certain qualities and traits are inheritable, or more simply that children are like their parents — their attempts to use the state as a mechanism to control these natural systems often turns out to be drastically worse than the natural systems that they seek to replace. 

As Keynes seems to admit when — in the German language edition of his General Theory — he noted that the conditions of a totalitarian state may be more amenable to his economic theory, the desire for control may be the real story here. 

Keynesianism brings more of the economy under the control of the state. It is a slow and creeping descent into dependency on the state. As we are seeing in Europe today, cuts in state spending in a state-dependent economy can cause deep economic contraction, providing the Keynesian more confirmation for his idea that the state should tax more, and spend more. 

That is, until nature intervenes. Just as a state-controlled eugenics program might well spawn an inbred elite suffering hereditary illnesses as a result of a lack of genetic diversity (as seems to have happened with the inbred elite Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood clan), so a state-controlled economy may well grind itself into the dirt as it runs out of innovation as a result of a lack of economic diversity. Such a situation is unsustainable — no planner is smarter than nature

PORTUGAL "BOMBA RELÓGIO"

Abaixo indico a fonte do artigo e o contéudo que interessa:

1. O buraco do BCP estima-se em 1% do PIB, o que já e duvidoso que seja esta a percentagem real.

2. O maios accionista do BCP é a Sonangol, que foi recapitalizada pela TROIKA, a que estamos portugueses todos sujeitos a medidas quase troianas de austeridade, e portanto estamos a "recapitalizar" Angola

2. O buraco do BCP provocou um desvio orçamental do nosso País de cerca de 85%

4. Os maiores accionistas como o Oliveira da Controlinveste está tão teso que vendeu o Grupo à Newshold, que por sua foi recapitalizada pelo BPI, hãn...outra vez a pagarmos aos angolanos.

5.estamos a pagar também via BCP o buraco de um Banco na Grécia de 52 milhões...

epá...leiam...:

No final de 2009, o BCP tinha concentrados, em apenas seis clientes, créditos de 3,5 mil milhões de euros, o equivalente, na altura, a aproximadamente 80% da capitalização bolsista do banco, de 4,3 mil milhões de euros. Neste grupo, que aparece na lista dos 50 maiores devedores da banca nacional, encontravam-se grandes accionistas (à época), como a Teixeira Duarte, a Soares da Costa, a Cimpor (onde o BCP tinha acções) e Joe Berardo, mas também Joaquim Oliveira (Controlinvest) e a Mota Engil. Só a empresa liderada por Jorge Coelho (Mota Engil) devia, então, ao BCP, 1,2 mil milhões de euros (28% da capitalização do banco). Após o último aumento de capital, apenas Joe Berardo (com 3,07%) e a TD (com pouco mais de 2%) se mantiveram na lista dos investidores de referência.

No final de 2011, Berardo devia cerca de 600 milhões de euros à CGD (200 milhões), ao BCP e ao BES. Mas a venda, no final de Setembro, da posição de 32% que detinha na Sogrape tem permitido a este investidor cumprir o serviço da dívida. Já Nuno Vasconcellos e Rafael Mora, donos da Ongoing, com créditos de 800 milhões de euros contraídos na segunda metade da década passada, junto do BCP e do BES, têm estado a utilizar os dividendos que recebem da PT para saldar os seus compromissos com a banca, nomeadamente, com o BCP. 
Joaquim Oliveira, que, por seu lado, negociou em 2006 parte da dívida ao grupo privado com o ex-gestor Alípio Dias e que a renegociou em 2008 com o ex-vice-presidente Armando Vara, continua a aguardar a formalização do acordo firmado em Março deste ano com o grupo angolano Newshold (proprietário do semanário Sol), com vista à venda da Controlinveste (Diário de Notícias, Jornal de Notícias, O Jogo e TSF). Esta operação é considerada essencial para manter "em equilíbrio" o relacionamento de Oliveira com o BCP.

O arrastar da crise financeira e económica veio pôr a nu as fragilidades das instituições financeiras e, no caso do BCP, a expressão dos prejuízos previstos para 2012 voltará a tornar impossível a sua absorção pelos resultados "normais" gerados pela actividade doméstica (economia a cair 3%) e internacional (degradação da operação grega). Os analistas têm admitido que o grupo feche, assim, o exercício deste ano com perdas entre 900 milhões e mil milhões de euros. Se juntarmos os 786 milhões negativos apurados em 2011, o prejuízo acumulado nos últimos dois anos cifrar-se-á em cerca de 1800 milhões de euros, ou seja, o equivalente a quase 1% do PIB e o correspondente a 85% do desvio orçamental deste ano. 

Recorde-se que o BCP, que tem como maior accionista o grupo público angolano Sonangol (15%), foi à linha de recapitalização negociada com a troika. O Tesouro subscreveu 3 mil milhões de euros de instrumentos híbridos convertíveis (CoCos), os accionistas entraram com 500 milhões e, neste quadro, o banco terá de gerar rendimentos suficientes para pagar a sua dívida ao Estado português e evitar a nacionalização, ainda que parcial. 

No final de 2009, o BCP tinha concentrados, em apenas seis clientes, créditos de 3,5 mil milhões de euros, o equivalente, na altura, a aproximadamente 80% da capitalização bolsista do banco, de 4,3 mil milhões de euros. Neste grupo, que aparece na lista dos 50 maiores devedores da banca nacional, encontravam-se grandes accionistas (à época), como a Teixeira Duarte, a Soares da Costa, a Cimpor (onde o BCP tinha acções) e Joe Berardo, mas também Joaquim Oliveira (Controlinvest) e a Mota Engil. Só a empresa liderada por Jorge Coelho (Mota Engil) devia, então, ao BCP, 1,2 mil milhões de euros (28% da capitalização do banco). Após o último aumento de capital, apenas Joe Berardo (com 3,07%) e a TD (com pouco mais de 2%) se mantiveram na lista dos investidores de referência. 

No final de 2011, Berardo devia cerca de 600 milhões de euros à CGD (200 milhões), ao BCP e ao BES. Mas a venda, no final de Setembro, da posição de 32% que detinha na Sogrape tem permitido a este investidor cumprir o serviço da dívida. Já Nuno Vasconcellos e Rafael Mora, donos da Ongoing, com créditos de 800 milhões de euros contraídos na segunda metade da década passada, junto do BCP e do BES, têm estado a utilizar os dividendos que recebem da PT para saldar os seus compromissos com a banca, nomeadamente, com o BCP. 

Joaquim Oliveira, que, por seu lado negociou em 2006 parte da dívida ao grupo privado com o ex-gestor Alípio Dias e que a renegociou em 2008 com o ex-vice-presidente Armando Vara, continua a aguardar a formalização do acordo firmado em Março deste ano com o grupo angolano Newshold (proprietário do semanário Sol), com vista à venda da Controlinveste (Diário de Notícias, Jornal de Notícias, O Jogo e TSF). Esta operação é considerada essencial para manter "em equilíbrio" o relacionamento de Oliveira com o BCP. 

No contexto da exposição do banco aos mercados internacionais, a actividade na Polónia é positiva, com o Bank Millennium a contribuir para as contas do grupo nos primeiros nove meses deste ano com lucros de 82,6 milhões de euros. Já a Grécia, onde o BCP detém um banco que foi alvo de uma oferta de compra rejeitada pela anterior gestão de Santos Ferreira, tem ajudado a agravar os prejuízos do grupo português. No primeiro semestre, o banco contabilizou na Grécia 450 milhões de euros de imparidades e um prejuízo de 52 milhões.