Translate

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Wealth Doesn't Trickle Down – It Just Floods Offshore, Research Reveals         AMERICAN KABUKI 2012-07-29



A far-reaching new study suggests a staggering $21tn in assets has been lost to global tax havens. If taxed, that could have been enough to put parts of Africa back on its feet – and even solve the euro crisis

Capital flight Illustration: Giulio Frigieri for the Observer (click here for a larger version of this graphic)

Heather Stewart
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 21 July 2012 16.00 EDT

Capital flight Illustration: Giulio Frigieri for the Observer (click here for a larger version of this graphic)
The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill.

But the kind of scheme Carr took part in is the tip of the iceberg, according to Henry's report, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited. Despite the professed determination of the G20 group of leading economies to tackle tax secrecy, investors in scores of countries – including the US and the UK – are still able to hide some or all of their assets from the taxman.

"This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries," Henry says.

Using the BIS's measure of "offshore deposits" – cash held outside the depositor's home country – and scaling it up according to the proportion of their portfolio large investors usually hold in cash, he estimates that between $21tn (£13tn) and $32tn (£20tn) in financial assets has been hidden from the world's tax authorities.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure," says John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people.

"This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich."

In total, 10 million individuals around the world hold assets offshore, according to Henry's analysis; but almost half of the minimum estimate of $21tn – $9.8tn – is owned by just 92,000 people. And that does not include the non-financial assets – art, yachts, mansions in Kensington – that many of the world's movers and shakers like to use as homes for their immense riches.

"If we could figure out how to tax all this offshore wealth without killing the proverbial golden goose, or at least entice its owners to reinvest it back home, this sector of the global underground is easily large enough to make a significant contribution to tax justice, investment and paying the costs of global problems like climate change," Henry says.

He corroborates his findings by using national accounts to assemble estimates of the cumulative capital flight from more than 130 low- to middle-income countries over almost 40 years, and the returns their wealthy owners are likely to have made from them.

In many cases, , the total worth of these assets far exceeds the value of the overseas debts of the countries they came from.

The struggles of the authorities in Egypt to recover the vast sums hidden abroad by Hosni Mubarak, his family and other cronies during his many years in power have provided a striking recent example of the fact that kleptocratic rulers can use their time to amass immense fortunes while many of their citizens are trapped in poverty.

The world's poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have fought long and hard in recent years to receive debt forgiveness from the international community; but this research suggests that in many cases, if they had been able to draw their richest citizens into the tax net, they could have avoided being dragged into indebtedness in the first place. Oil-rich Nigeria has seen more than $300bn spirited away since 1970, for example, while Ivory Coast has lost $141bn.

Assuming that super-rich investors earn a relatively modest 3% a year on their $21tn, taxing that vast wall of money at 30% would generate a very useful $189bn a year – more than rich economies spend on aid to the rest of the world.

The sheer scale of the hidden assets held by the super-rich also suggests that standard measures of inequality, which tend to rely on surveys of household income or wealth in individual countries, radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor.

Milorad Kovacevic, chief statistician of the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, says both the very wealthy and the very poor tend to be excluded from mainstream calculations of inequality.

"People that are in charge of measuring inequality based on survey data know that the both ends of the distribution are underrepresented – or, even better, misrepresented," he says.

"There is rarely a household from the top 1% earners that participates in the survey. On the other side, the poor people either don't have addresses to be selected into the sample, or when selected they misquote their earnings – usually biasing them upwards."

Inequality is widely seen as having increased sharply in many developed countries over the past decade or more – as described in a recent paper from the IMF, which showed marked increases in the so-called Gini coefficient, which economists use to measure how evenly income is shared across societies.

Globalisation has exposed low-skilled workers to competition from cheap economies such as China, while the surging profitability of the financial services industry – and the spread of the big bonus culture before the credit crunch – led to what economists have called a "racing away" at the top of the income scale.

However, Henry's research suggests that this acknowledged jump in inequality is a dramatic underestimate. Stewart Lansley, author of the recent book The Cost of Inequality, says: "There is absolutely no doubt at all that the statistics on income and wealth at the top understate the problem."

The surveys that are used to compile the Gini coefficient "simply don't touch the super-rich," he says. "You don't pick up the multimillionaires and billionaires, and even if you do, you can't pick it up properly."

In fact, some experts believe the amount of assets being held offshore is so large that accounting for it fully would radically alter the balance of financial power between countries. The French economist Thomas Piketty, an expert on inequality who helps compile the World Top Incomes Database, says research by his colleagues has shown that "the wealth held in tax havens is probably sufficiently substantial to turn Europe into a very large net creditor with respect to the rest of the world."

In other words, even a solution to the eurozone's seemingly endless sovereign debt crisis might be within reach – if only Europe's governments could get a grip on the wallets of their own wealthiest citizens.

• This article was amended on 23 July. In the original graphic Poland was shown in the wrong place. This has been corrected



Capital flight Illustration: Giulio Frigieri for the Observer (click here for a larger version of this graphic)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/offshore-wealth-global-economy-tax-havens

A far-reaching new study suggests a staggering $21tn in assets has been lost to global tax havens. If taxed, that could have been enough to put parts of Africa back on its feet – and even solve the euro crisis


by Heather Stewart

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 21 July 2012 16.00 EDT

Capital flight Illustration: Giulio Frigieri for the Observer

The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill.

But the kind of scheme Carr took part in is the tip of the iceberg, according to Henry's report, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited. Despite the professed determination of the G20 group of leading economies to tackle tax secrecy, investors in scores of countries – including the US and the UK – are still able to hide some or all of their assets from the taxman.

"This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries," Henry says.

Using the BIS's measure of "offshore deposits" – cash held outside the depositor's home country – and scaling it up according to the proportion of their portfolio large investors usually hold in cash, he estimates that between $21tn (£13tn) and $32tn (£20tn) in financial assets has been hidden from the world's tax authorities.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure," says John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people.

"This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich."

In total, 10 million individuals around the world hold assets offshore, according to Henry's analysis; but almost half of the minimum estimate of $21tn – $9.8tn – is owned by just 92,000 people. And that does not include the non-financial assets – art, yachts, mansions in Kensington – that many of the world's movers and shakers like to use as homes for their immense riches.

"If we could figure out how to tax all this offshore wealth without killing the proverbial golden goose, or at least entice its owners to reinvest it back home, this sector of the global underground is easily large enough to make a significant contribution to tax justice, investment and paying the costs of global problems like climate change," Henry says.

He corroborates his findings by using national accounts to assemble estimates of the cumulative capital flight from more than 130 low- to middle-income countries over almost 40 years, and the returns their wealthy owners are likely to have made from them.

In many cases, , the total worth of these assets far exceeds the value of the overseas debts of the countries they came from.

The struggles of the authorities in Egypt to recover the vast sums hidden abroad by Hosni Mubarak, his family and other cronies during his many years in power have provided a striking recent example of the fact that kleptocratic rulers can use their time to amass immense fortunes while many of their citizens are trapped in poverty.

The world's poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have fought long and hard in recent years to receive debt forgiveness from the international community; but this research suggests that in many cases, if they had been able to draw their richest citizens into the tax net, they could have avoided being dragged into indebtedness in the first place. Oil-rich Nigeria has seen more than $300bn spirited away since 1970, for example, while Ivory Coast has lost $141bn.

Assuming that super-rich investors earn a relatively modest 3% a year on their $21tn, taxing that vast wall of money at 30% would generate a very useful $189bn a year – more than rich economies spend on aid to the rest of the world.

The sheer scale of the hidden assets held by the super-rich also suggests that standard measures of inequality, which tend to rely on surveys of household income or wealth in individual countries, radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor.

Milorad Kovacevic, chief statistician of the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report, says both the very wealthy and the very poor tend to be excluded from mainstream calculations of inequality.

"People that are in charge of measuring inequality based on survey data know that the both ends of the distribution are underrepresented – or, even better, misrepresented," he says.

"There is rarely a household from the top 1% earners that participates in the survey. On the other side, the poor people either don't have addresses to be selected into the sample, or when selected they misquote their earnings – usually biasing them upwards."

Inequality is widely seen as having increased sharply in many developed countries over the past decade or more – as described in a recent paper from the IMF, which showed marked increases in the so-called Gini coefficient, which economists use to measure how evenly income is shared across societies.

Globalisation has exposed low-skilled workers to competition from cheap economies such as China, while the surging profitability of the financial services industry – and the spread of the big bonus culture before the credit crunch – led to what economists have called a "racing away" at the top of the income scale.

However, Henry's research suggests that this acknowledged jump in inequality is a dramatic underestimate. Stewart Lansley, author of the recent book The Cost of Inequality, says: "There is absolutely no doubt at all that the statistics on income and wealth at the top understate the problem."

The surveys that are used to compile the Gini coefficient "simply don't touch the super-rich," he says. "You don't pick up the multimillionaires and billionaires, and even if you do, you can't pick it up properly."

In fact, some experts believe the amount of assets being held offshore is so large that accounting for it fully would radically alter the balance of financial power between countries. The French economist Thomas Piketty, an expert on inequality who helps compile the World Top Incomes Database, says research by his colleagues has shown that "the wealth held in tax havens is probably sufficiently substantial to turn Europe into a very large net creditor with respect to the rest of the world."

In other words, even a solution to the eurozone's seemingly endless sovereign debt crisis might be within reach – if only Europe's governments could get a grip on the wallets of their own wealthiest citizens.

• This article was amended on 23 July. In the original graphic Poland was shown in the wrong place. This has been corrected

Colorado Massacre Linked To Historic Bank Fraud - Killer Does Not Appear To Be James Holmes




July 29, 2012

This was posted at: http://anoncentral.tumblr.com/post/28109989079/colorado-massacre-linked-to-historic-bank-fraud


Colorado Massacre Linked To Historic Bank Fraud - Killer Does Not Appear To Be James Holmes





KILLER DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE JAMES HOLMES - JAMES HOLMES BEING USED IN BLACKMAIL OF ROBERT HOLMES FINANCIAL FRAUD DETECTION EXPERT FOR FICO IN LIBOR SCANDAL.

James Holmes father Robert Holmes, was said to have been scheduled to testify within the next few weeks before a US Senate panel on the massive banking crime called the LIBOR Scandal where UK banks fixed the London Interbank Borrowing Rate with the complicity of the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve (which knew about this crime for 4 years and didn’t report it) and many other major Western banks.

Not known to the majority of those affected by this LIBOR rate scandal (which is everyone in the world) is that its historically low setting of interests rates since the beginning of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2012 has done more to destroy the life savings, stock investments and retirements of Americas middle class than any other single event in their entire history.

Even worse, according to this report, Holmes recently completed his work on what is called one of the most sophisticated computer algorithms ever developed that not only uncovered the true intent of this massive fraud, but is, also, able to trace the Trillions of Dollars “lost” to the exact bank accounts of the elite classes who have stolen it.

This Colorado massacre occurred within minutes of London’s Guardian News Service releasing report this past Saturday (21 July) titledWealth Doesn’t trickle Down – It Just Floods Offshore, Research Revealsas Robert Holmes algorithms [AI neural networks] were said used to discover this massive fraud scheme.

Equally curious to note about this massacre is that the American intelligence website TheIntelHub.Com in their 23 July article titled “Hallmarks of a False Flag: Colorado University Held Identical Drill on Same Day as Aurora Theater Mass Shooting, Mind Control, and Multiple Suspects” states that just mere hours before this shocking crime was committed the Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill that simulated a shooter in a movie theater.

“False flag” events such as the Colorado massacre are actively planned for by the US Army as noted in their training manual titled “Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces”.

Ben Swann from their WXIX-FOX19 station out of Cincinnati, Ohio, who asks:

“Why did Holmes go to the expense and trouble of rigging his apartment with an array of deadly explosives and then immediately tell police about the bombs when he was arrested? If Holmes wanted to kill as many people as possible, why warn the cops ahead of time?

Given the fact that Holmes was a graduate student in neuroscience, where did he obtain the skills to create a maze of bombs so complex that it took the FBI two days to disarm them? According to experts, the intricacy of the bombs was reminiscent of war zones – how could Holmes have set all this up without help from an explosives expert?

Despite police claiming “every single indicator” tells them the shooting was a lone wolf attack, numerous witnesses have described accomplices. Initial police reports that suggested the involvement of two or more shooters were quickly buried and the lone wolf narrative aggressively pushed.

As Swann points out, eyewitnesses interviewed after the shooting such as Corbin Dates state that Holmes received a phone call from someone while he was inside the theater and responded by moving to the emergency exit, suggesting the call was an accomplice coordinating the attack.

Dates also said he saw Holmes by the exit door “signaling somebody or looking for somebody to come his way.

Another eyewitness added, “From what we saw he wasn’t alone – he had someone with him. Because the second can of tear gas didn’t come from his side.”

The real James Holmes apparently has been abducted (compare photos) to force FICO crime scientist Robert Holmes to not testify in LIBOR scandal — his expertise as scienfiic director at FICO investigating fraud by statistical patterns and expert in credit scoring analysis -

The real James Holmes is on the right [Terran Note: This appears to be a typo, the real James is on the left as in the photo above]. This imposter is on assignment and somehow has been assured of protection and is a pure sociopath earning a buck. If the real James Holmes has been taken then his parents, of course, know it.

James’ father is a mathematician/statistician who works for FICO which scores our credit using among other things the inter-bank interest rate set by LIBOR. FICO is the eyes, the intelligence of lenders in discriminating among potential borrowers as risks. James Holmes was the lead developer of FICO’s fraud manager system for financial institutions. [He is also one of the leading San Diego researchers on neural network based artificial intelligence systems.]

The LIBOR scandal which involves the biggest and most powerful merchant banking houses in the City of London is in the midst of the biggest fraud scandal in history. Here is money and motive enough to make conceivable a black-operation on the scale of the James Holmes frameup.

The bankers are major criminals and have been for sometime. They are criminals with trillions at their disposal. They control all strategic institutions of probably all major governments or are working towards that end. They need to know that no man in law enforcement or fraud detection can harm them, and so they have prepared means of intervening to prevent — by murder, blackmail, intimidation, bribery or psychological manipulation by methods developed in secret by the former Soviet Union, China, Israel and the officially denied equally unrestrained CIA and also mercenary intelligence and espionage services retained by high financial organized crime. What I am driving at is that operations like this may be on stand-by for any fraud investigator or honest politician or financial expert the banks legitimately employ. James Holmes may have been targeted early as the handle by which to control Robert Holmes if that is necessary.

Robert Holmes knows which of these to is his son and which is not.

Not only is the arm of the international banking crime syndicate able to reach out and stop investigating statistician-mathematician -operations-analysis fraud investigators like Robert Holmes - they are also, very easily, able to keep police and defense attorneys from following the right lines of evidence. The resources to intimidate or bribe or otherwise control person after person to prevent an outcome or to force an outcome certainly exists, certainly is part of the defensive equipment of the most powerful criminal syndicate the world has seen.

The only defense the people have against the banking crime families is for the public to spread the word and all as one speak with a unified voice of public opinion. But of course the bankers can thwart that, as they have with 9-11, with the economic depression, with countless other crimes too big and too amazing even to believe when they are all listed on one page. (for example, weaponized weather modification and the ability to take control of planes. The fact that the prisoner in the Aurora shooting is not James Holmes. That a crime this elaborate and expensive could only be performed in the interests of the most powerful people on the planet — and they are the international bankers to whom this one country owe 14 trillion dollars — a good portion of which figure was determined by fraudulent manipulations of the LIBOR (inter-bank exchange rate) which has been set to favor the bankers rather than to reflect currently obtaining lending market conditions as it is represented as doing. This crime could spell the end of the international bankers — and that is why they went to such lengths to kidnap James Holmes and substitute this mass-murdering imposter in his place — and who we may shortly be hearing killed himself — I can’t see how they can let him go on public trial, or appear with his hair dyed back to its original color.

Holmes father:

Robert went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Stanford, a master’s in biostatistics at UCLA, and a doctorate in statistics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. His doctoral thesis was titled “Contributions to the Theory of Parametric Estimation in Randomly Censored Data.” He subsequently authored studies for the Navy and the Marine Corps on how to forecast personnel changes using something called “tree classifications,” the trees in question being statistical. Eventually, reports say, he signed on as a low-six-figure-a-year senior scientist with FICO, which produces management systems, fraud protection, and credit scores

RENSE.COM: Will The REAL James Holmes Please Stand Up?



July 29, 2012


Jeff Rense Writes: 

"Is it not exceedingly clear that the alleged shooter who made his first court room appearance is not the same "James Holmes" as depicted in earlier photos?  

Wouldn't that be the felony crime of Subornation of Perjury?

Subornation of perjury, in United States law, is the crime of persuading a person to commit perjury; [as in substitution of suspects?] and also describes the circumstance wherein an attorney causes or allows another party to lie. In American federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 1622 provides:
Whoever procures another to commit any perjury is guilty of subornation of perjury, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."