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Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians
Bilderberg 2015 – Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians
Out at my car I couldn’t be bothered to get into the whole ‘probable cause’ thing so I flung open the doors and with as much good cheer as I could muster, said: “Help yourself”. They did. While one set of police searched my car with their torches, another lot clustered round me and asked me questions: “Where do you live? What are you doing here?” I’m a journalist and I live in a police state. What about you?
A little while later, bored and a bit cold, I decided to point out to the officers that while they were treating a journalist like a criminal, there were actual criminals about to arrive at the hotel they were guarding. Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss, David Petraeus, who’s just been handed a $100,000 (£64,000) fine and two years’ probation for leaking classified information.
I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular attendee at Bilderberg, and he’s heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank’s board of directors, Rona Fairhead. Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank’s busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.
A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC “a bank beyond shame” after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay £28m in fines to Swiss regulators investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy – he’ll go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.
– From Charlie Skelton’s excellent article: Bilderberg 2015: Where Criminals Mingle with Ministers
Charlie Skelton is a Oxford University educated comedy writer, journalist, artist and actor who has covered the Bilderberg meeting for the Guardian since 2009. This year’s meeting took on a particularly eventful twist for Mr. Skelton, something he wrote about in a powerful article published last week.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
‘Titanic’ Global Economy May “Collapse” Warn HSBC – Gold Is Lifeboat
‘Titanic’ Global Economy May “Collapse” Warn HSBC – Gold Is Lifeboat
-“The world economy is like an ocean liner without lifeboats …” – HSBC
– Four areas of high risk identified by HSBC
– Risk of stock market crash
– Pension funds and insurers may not meet obligations
– Chinese recession may drag U.S. into recession or depression
– Premature rate rise would expose very fragile global economy
– “There aren’t enough lifeboats to go round”
– Gold vital lifeboat when global ship strikes iceberg
The chief economist of the world’s third largest bank, HSBC’s Stephen King, has compared the global economy to the Titanic.
In a note to clients on Wednesday he wrote “We may not know what will cause the next downswing but, at this stage, we can categorically state that, in the event we hit an iceberg, there aren’t enough lifeboats to go round.”
“The world economy is like an ocean liner without lifeboats.” As we have been warning in recent months, when another recession arrives, governments do not have the ability or the reserves to prop up the economy like they did in 2008.
Global debt has soared by 40 percent since the Great Recession. We now have a staggering $200 trillion of debt globally, or almost three times the size of the global economy. It would be a “truly titanic struggle” for policymakers to right the economy, King said.
He believes that we are now nearer to the next global recession than we are to the last one which ended six years ago. In that time, however, the world has amassed mountains of new unpayable debt – expanding 25% in the last six years – and the U.S. economy has been sluggish despite an unprecedented wave of money printing which was intended to boost the economy. Indeed, post recession growth has never been so anaemic in recent history.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As Banks Tighten Grip on the Media, British Journalist Rebels Against HSBC-Run Telegraph
As Banks Tighten Grip on the Media, British Journalist Rebels Against HSBC-Run Telegraph
“Banks are the feudal knights of today’s world,” Hervé Falciani says in an interview. “They are a power without a counterweight, without opposition.”
That is not to say that they don’t have a weak point, adds the 42-year-old whistleblower who blew the lid on HSBC’s global tax evasion and money laundering practices. “For the banks, reputation is increasingly important. When they lose it, they don’t know how to get it back.”
Hence the importance of banks being able to control news at its source, as the Daily Telegraph’s ex-chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, has learned, and (to his great credit) revealed in a ball-busting exposé of his former employer’s cozy ties with the world’s second largest – and arguably most criminal – bank:
Three years ago the Telegraph investigations team… received a tip off about accounts held with HSBC in Jersey… After three months’ research the Telegraph resolved to publish. Six articles on this subject can now be found online, between 8 and 15 November 2012, although three are not available to view.
Thereafter no fresh reports appeared. Reporters were ordered to destroy all emails, reports and documents related to the HSBC investigation… From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged. HSBC suspended its advertising with the Telegraph…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Taxes and corruption
Taxes and corruption
It seems that the rumbling story about HSBC’s Swiss branch has achieved what political pollsters know as “cut through” – meaning that it’s of interest to voters as well as to those reporters who are sentenced to watch Prime Minister’s Questions each week.
The story reminded me of a passage in Wolfgang Streeck’s 2014 article ‘How Will Capitalism End?’ in which he explores the drivers of change that could bring about, well, the end of capitalism. The article deserves more space here on another occasion, but for the moment I just wanted to quote what he writes about his fifth driver, corruption:
Finance is an ‘industry’ where innovation is hard to distinguish from rule-bending or rule-breaking; where the payoffs from semi-legal and illegal activities are particularly high; where the gradient in expertise and pay between firms and regulatory authorities is extreme; where revolving doors between the two offer unending possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle corruption; where the largest firms are not just too big to fail, but also too big to jail, given their importance for national economic policy and tax revenue; and where the borderline between private companies and the state is more blurred than anywhere else, as indicated by the 2008 bailout or by the huge number of former and future employees of financial firms in the American government.
So far, fairly familiar, if admirably concise. The more important element here is that what this has done is broken the moral story about capitalism – work and the Protestant ethic and all that – that writers such as Max Weber spent so long trying to assemble at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
HSBC bank ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’
HSBC bank ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’
Banking giant HSBC helped wealthy clients across the world evade billions of pounds worth of tax, the BBC has learned.
Panorama has seen accounts from 100,000 clients in more than 200 countries, leaked by a whistleblower in 2007.
The documents include details of almost 7,000 clients based in the UK.
HSBC admitted that some individuals took advantage of bank secrecy to hold undeclared accounts. But it said it has now “fundamentally changed”.
The bank now faces criminal investigations in the US, France, Belgium and Argentina.
HSBC said it is “co-operating with relevant authorities”. But in the UK, where the bank is based, no such action has been taken.
Offshore accounts are not illegal, but many people use them to hide cash from the tax authorities. And while tax avoidance is perfectly legal, deliberately hiding money to evade tax is not.
India’s finance minister Arun Jaitley has said that all Indian names on the list will be investigated, although he cautioned that some accounts might be legitimate. A current inquiry looking into more than 600 people who hold accounts overseas, will now be widened to look into the the current list of names.
The French authorities concluded in 2013 that 99.8% of their citizens on the list were probably evading tax.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
