Spock wrote:
[quote=samintx]

I believe the sequester is not cutting but not letting depts (govmt spending) GROW.

Spock wrote:
[quote=samintx]

I believe the sequester is not cutting but not letting depts (govmt spending) GROW.

Spock wrote:
Try reading the text of the BUDGET CONTROL ACT OF 2011

Fraud experts say offshore bank accounts and companies are vital to the operation of complex financial crimes. Allen Stanford, who ran a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, used a bank he controlled in Antigua. Bernard Madoff, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, used a series of offshore “feeder funds” to fuel the growth of his multibillion-dollar house of cards.

Michael I. Goldberg, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., attorney who often testifies as an expert on Ponzi schemes, said it is rare to see one that does not make use of the offshore world.

“If you don’t, it’s usually a very parochial, Podunk type of Ponzi,” he said. “But the more sophisticated ones almost always do.”

The offshore world makes it hard for prosecutors pursuing complex financial crimes to follow the money, because many offshore jurisdictions refuse to recognize U.S. subpoenas and account information is hidden under layers of corporate shells.

“People were trying to hide their money from the IRS, or they were trying to hide their money from law enforcement, or they were trying to hide their money from regulators,” said Paul E. Pelletier, the principal deputy chief of the Justice Department’s fraud section who prosecuted Stanford before entering private practice in 2011. “As a prosecutor, it was very difficult pursuing these people.”

swampy wrote:
Just another left wing journalistic distraction.

It comes as a surprise to most people that the most important player in the global offshore system of tax havens is not Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, but Britain, sitting at the center of a web of British-linked tax havens, the last remnants of empire. An inner ring consists of the British Crown Dependencies—Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man. Farther afield are Britain’s 14 Overseas Territories, half of them tax havens, including such offshore giants as the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands (B.V.I.), and Bermuda. Still further out, numerous British Commonwealth countries and former colonies such as Hong Kong, with deep and old links to London, continue to feed vast financial flows—clean, questionable, and dirty—into the City. The half-in, half-out relationship provides the reassuring British legal bedrock while providing enough distance to let the U.K. say “There is nothing we can do” when scandal hits.

Data is scarce, but in the second quarter of 2009 the three Crown dependencies alone provided $332.5 billion in net financing to the City of London, much of it from tax-evading foreign money. Matters are so out of hand that in 2001 Britain’s own tax authorities sold off 600 buildings to a company, Mapeley Steps Ltd., registered in the tax haven of Bermuda to avoid tax.

Britain could close down this tax-haven secrecy overnight if it wanted, but the City of London won’t let it. “We have, to put it provocatively, a second British empire, which is at the very core of global financial markets today,” explains Ronen Palan, professor of international political economy at City University in London. “And Britain is very good at not advertising its position.