Swiss banking secrecy

FITTINGLY for a business that has peddled discretion for 271 years, the Zurich office of Wegelin is easy to miss. But according to an indictment unsealed in New York on February 2nd, Switzerland's oldest bank brazenly helped its clients dodge American taxes on $1.2 billion in offshore accounts and poached American clients from UBS, a giant Swiss bank that prosecutors ensnared earlier. This first indictment of a Swiss bank has rocked the country's financial industry. Konrad Hummler, Wegelin's boss, had bluntly defended the right of banks to shield clients from their governments' tax regimes; he once dismissed critics as “tax cartels” and “illegitimate states”. Now even humble pie may not save his bank from a criminal conviction in America. Governments once turned a blind eye to their wealthy citizens' offshore tax acrobatics. Now they are strapped for cash and hungrily hunt every penny in tax revenue. So a cold war on banking secrecy is turning hot. Tax evasion costs governments $3.1 trillion annually, according to Tax Justice Network, a lobby group. America, Britain and Germany have sought deals with Switzerland, Liechtenstein and other havens; the European Union is tightening up. Emerging powers like India are waging their own campaigns, too. Swiss law entrenched bank secrecy in 1934, making it a criminal offence to reveal a client's identity. This has created the world's biggest tax haven: Switzerland's banks house around $2.1 trillion, or 27%, of offshore wealth, according to the Boston Consulting Group (see chart). Swiss bankers and regulators have long dodged and blunted outsiders' efforts to erode banking secrecy: out of a principled deference for their respectable and prudent customers' privacy, they insist; because of the fat fees paid by crooks, tax-dodgers and dictators, say critics. America has taken the toughest stance. It wants 11 Swiss banks to hand over their American clients' names. In the first big breach in Swiss secrecy, UBS agreed in 2009 to pay a $780m fine for aiding tax evasion and turned over data on more than 4,400 accounts. Last month several more banks handed over client details, but encrypted the data pending a final deal. This, plus the indictment of Wegelin, is expected to scare many Americans with offshore accounts into voluntarily coming forward. America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has launched its third amnesty programme in as many years. But more woes loom. Starting in 2013, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) will put the burden on foreign financial institutions to look for and report American account-holders or face a 30% withholding tax on American investments. Though FATCA may raise $10 billion over ten years, the costs for the foreign banks that have to implement it could be a lot more. America gave some ground on February 8th, outlining a gentler timetable and an easier ride for low-risk banks. Other governments have taken an altogether softer tack. Rather than trying to force Switzerland to abandon its policy of keeping client accounts anonymous—and risk getting nothing—Germany and Britain last year both negotiated bilateral “Rubik” deals (named after a cubic puzzle that can be solved only with moves in strict sequence). Offshore-account holders must pay a lump sum to make up for unpaid taxes, plus an annual withholding tax. Switzerland then collects the money and passes it along. But the names stay anonymous. Many see that as a big Swiss win. Critics also say British hopes that the deal could raise up to £7 billion ($11 billion) are hugely optimistic. Now America's stance is stiffening spines elsewhere. German politicians claim their Rubik deal lets Switzerland off too easily. And the European Commission says both deals may be illegal under the EU savings-tax directive of 2005, because they let offshore-account holders pay a lower rate of withholding tax without having to reveal their identities. Algirdas Semeta, the commissioner for taxation, says the deals must be renegotiated. Britain and Germany, he says, have quietly agreed to do so rather than risk ending up in the European Court of Justice. Officials in London and Berlin had no specific comment on that. Mr Semeta's “top priority” this year is to toughen the EU savings-tax directive further. He hopes to gain a negotiating mandate this month. Assuming Luxembourg and Austria, the EU's own two tax havens, agree, that could mean more withholding taxes, and a squeeze on discretionary trusts (complicated and murky entities adored by tax lawyers). The big goal is automatic information exchange between countries' fiscal authorities. This would spell the end of Swiss banking secrecy and be a fatal blow to other tax havens. For now, the standard imposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Paris-based good-government club, is “information on request”. Switzerland agreed to this only when threatened with blacklisting. A government can ask for data about specific offenders; but no fishing expeditions are allowed, and the number of requests permitted each year is capped. “It's as if the OECD has been asked to drain a swamp and they're handing out drinking straws,” says Nicholas Shaxson, a former Economist journalist and author of “Treasure Islands”, a book about tax havens. Mr Semeta insists he is ready to take a harder line with Switzerland this time around and will use “sticks”, not just “carrots”. One such weapon could be to restrict Swiss access to EU markets. The secret's out The sparring has bruised the Swiss. Many were furious about the indictment of Wegelin. “During peace talks you don't attack,” says Martin Naville of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce. But others are growing weary. Public support for secrecy is waning. When Philipp Hildebrand, the central-bank boss, resigned in January over a currency trade by his wife, public concern centred on his possible lapse of judgment, not the privacy breach that revealed it (the trade was leaked by an employee at a private bank). In years past, it would have been the other way round. Even in financier-friendly Switzerland, the economic crisis has dented bankers' popularity, as have public revelations about money laundering and shady conduct. Two whistle-blowers have rocked the banks: Rudolf Elmer, who gave documents to WikiLeaks about the Cayman operations of Julius Baer, another Swiss private bank, and Bradley Birkenfeld at UBS. Both have had legal troubles as a result. The uncertainty is bad for business. Even bankers talk resignedly about the need to reach a settlement soon, although few agree what it should look like (and even fewer would countenance automatic information exchange). At the very least, banks are going to have to write some hefty cheques. On February 6th the boss of Julius Baer, the largest Swiss private bank, said he was expecting to have to pay a fine to the IRS. Booz & Company, a consultancy, says that the Swiss financial sector may lose SFr47 billion ($51 billion) in assets and SFr1.1 billion in revenues as a result of just the German and British deals. And those were the lenient ones. Some say clients are already shifting assets to more fortress-like jurisdictions like Singapore (such outflows are all but impossible to measure). As they fight off attacks, Swiss bankers are trying to come up with an alternative business model. “Plan B” is to focus more on rich customers in politically unstable developing countries. In short, if Switzerland cannot peddle secrecy, it can at least offer stability. Helping rich people in poor, weak countries hang on to their ill-gotten gains may be lucrative, whatever the reputational risk. The embattled Swiss bemoan the pressure and even like to label their detractors “imperialists”. A common (and reasonable) complaint is that many of the countries pressing them are also tax havens in their own right. The United States houses money from Latin America in its Florida banks, and under Delaware and Nevada law it is easy to set up a tax-friendly shell company. Britain has the Channel Islands. “They have no moral right to push Switzerland on this, because they haven't cleaned up their own mess,” harrumphs a Swiss proponent of secrecy. But, clearly that is not stopping them. http://www.economist.com/node/21547229 

Online Criminals Transfer Trillions Through Swiss Bank Accounts This is the story of how an amateur criminal used a simple piece of code and exploited some poorly written software to amass trillions of dollars and then distribute his ill-gotten gains almost at random. A few online games have already been launched, designed to take advantage of Twitter’s huge and rapidly expanding user base. Arguably one of the most successful, or annoying, depending on your point of view is Spymaster.

http://countermeasures.trendmicro.eu/online-criminals-transfer-trillions-through-swiss-bank-accounts/

the common skill :)

food overflow

Of the roughly 7 billion people in the world, an estimated 870 million suffer each day from hunger. That's hunger from malnutrition or not eating even the lowest amount of daily recommended calories—1,800—while often enduring food insecurity, or not knowing where the next meal is coming from. The consistently massive population of hungry people—along with variables like severe weather and economic downturns—sometimes spark warnings that the planet faces impending food shortages. And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum. This paradox is nothing new, experts say. It just shows the problem isn't that we have too little food, it's what we do with the food we have. "We have two or three times the amount of food right now that is needed to feed the number of people in the world," said Joshua Muldavin, a geography professor at Sarah Lawrence College who focuses on food and agricultural instruction. "A lot of people aren't analyzing the situation correctly. We can deal with short-term food shortages after a disaster, but fixing long term hunger gets ignored," he said. "We don't have food shortage problem," said Emelie Peine, a professor of international politics and economy at the University of Puget Sound. "What we have is a distribution problem and an income problem," Peine said. "People aren't getting the food, ... and even if [they] did, they don't have enough money to buy it." If there is enough food, a major problem causing scarcity is what we do with it, said Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, an advocacy group for U.S. farmers. "Something in the area of up to half of all that's produced is wasted," said Johnson, who runs his own farm in North Dakota. "In the undeveloped world, the waste happens before the food gets to people, from lack of roads and proper storage facilities, and the food rots," Johnson said. "In the developed world, it's the staggering amount of food that's thrown out after it gets to our plates." Food inflation Of the near billion who go hungry, some 852 million live in developing countries, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (WFO). But the world's largest economy— and the richest country on Earth—is not immune from hunger. An estimated one in six people, or some 50 million U.S.citizens, are unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy, according to the Department of Agriculture. Nearly 17 million are children. "Our services are needed now more than ever," said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, a nonprofit hunger relief organization. "With so many people out of work, it's not hard to figure out why." "Many low income seniors use us on regular basis. We serve some three million a year," Fraser said. "They have fixed incomes and with other costs they have like medical bills or just paying the rent, they're often in need of food assistance." Seniors or anyone else trying to get a handle on food costs are constantly riding a see-saw of inflation. In 2012, according to the WFO, global food prices rose to near-record levels, rising 6 percent last July alone. But according to the Global Food Security Index, food and beverage prices worldwide should drop by 5.7 percent through 2013, mainly due to bumper crops of corn and wheat resulting from favorable weather conditions. "Food inflation and scarcity go hand in hand," said Mary Lawton Johnson, a food specialist, chef and author based in Palm Beach, Fla. "Given a natural disaster, food and other items naturally go up in price," she said. "Once that scarcity is gone, food inflation reduces." Plenty of solutions? Even if prices are not going through the roof, buying more nutritious food is still costly. "It is ironic that good or healthier food like apples are more expensive than the food laced with sugars or fats," said Peine. "We need to be more thoughtful on what food we grow." But the reason for the higher prices is fairly simple, said the National Farmers Union's Johnson. "Crops like vegetables and fruits are more perishable, so they are more expensive to grow," he said. "Unlike other commodities, they are just less profitable for farmers." A further irony in the world's hunger problem is that farmers—outside of developed countries—make up a majority of the world's poorest and hungriest people. "Many farmers don't make enough to live on each year," Ron Johnson said. "Underdeveloped economies and some global trade are pushing them to the side." The WFO cites various causes for hunger and food insecurity—poverty, war, climate change, shrinking land and water resources, economic and political disruption. Suggested solutions are just as plentiful. "We don't need more corn and soybeans, which have become part of the ethanol focus to be energy efficient, and for feeding livestock," Peine said. "What we do need is to produce food to eat rather than industrial commodities." Technology could be a key to ending food scarcity, said Charlie Arnot, CEO of the Center for Food Integrity, a nonprofit group with business members including ConAgra and DuPont. "We should be using more genetically modified crops that would produce stronger and sturdier crops," Arnot said. "We need to move food from where it is to where it isn't and that means investing in agriculture development using the best technologies we have," Arnot added. But technology comes with risk, said chef Mary Lawton Johnson. "I'm not in favor of genetically modified foods to feed a starving world," she said. "The health side effects can be dangerous in my opinion." (Read more: As drought spreads, firms could be up the creek) "What we need is more localization of food-growing. Let the crops natural to the land grow instead of pushing crops that are not meant to be there," she said. Food shortage solutions includes taming the investing markets, said Sarah Lawrence's Muldavin. "The market trading of commodities is overboard and not helping food prices," said Muldavin. "Why does a bushel of wheat have to be traded five times a day?" "I think we need to step out of the way of the market place and let it take its course," said Tim Richards, a professor of agribusiness at Arizona State University. "We're destroying local food markets around the world by forcing them to buy U.S. commodities." "We should stop global government support for farmers. The market does a fantastic job of sorting out prices and food production," said Richards. "If we just stay out of the way, food shortages could be eliminated." Change the food debate Last October, the WFO issued a warning saying a global food crisis could happen in 2013. The alarm was over rising food prices, lack of grain reserves and extreme weather conditions. All those conditions have receded this year as prices have pulled back, reserves have increased and some areas of the globe have seen better weather. But eradicating world hunger won't be as simple as drought-ending rains or silos full of wheat, said Muldavin. "A lot of folks have different opinions on how to solve the problem of hunger," he said. "But we have to reframe the debate from food shortages to understanding why so many people are not accessing good, nutritious food." —By CNBC's Mark Koba. http://www.cnbc.com/id/100893540 it's easier to relocate food in needed places than to relocate whole nations where the food overflow..... GET SHORTY - Trailer - (1995) HQ

The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass 02. Sky Ferry

The Hours - soundtrack

Judge Judy, Judge Mathis

Beautiful arabian chillout - Lost In The Desert (mixed by SpringLady)

swallowed cash

$1 Trillion Underground Economy America’s Shadow Black Economy Doubles to $2 Trillion David Zeiler writes: Doing what they can to survive in a dour job market, millions of Americans exist in an underground economy that has ballooned to $2 trillion annually. By “underground economy,” we’re talking about all the business activity that is not reported to the government, which includes a growing number of people getting paid for their labor in cash. That means the shadowy figures of the underground economy – the drug dealers and Mafia godfathers, for example – now have a lot more company. But most of these new participants in the underground economy are ordinary hard-working Americans who are increasingly taking jobs that pay “under the table” either because nothing else is available or they need a second source of income to make ends meet. America’s underground economy is nothing new, but since the Great Recession hit, experts estimate it has doubled in size, driven by unemployed or underemployed people desperate for income. Paying workers off the books also has great appeal to employers, who then can avoid paying benefits and, starting next year, some of the costs imposed by the Obamacare law. “It’s typical that during recessions people work on the side while collecting unemployment,” Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, told The New Yorker. “But the severity of the recession and the profound weakness of this recovery may mean that a lot more people have entered the underground economy, and have had to stay there longer.” Who Lives in America’s Underground Economy? Some of the folks who’ve become trapped in the underground economy have been there for years, such as construction workers, childcare workers, illegal aliens and housekeepers. People who do such service jobs often get paid partly or entirely under the table. The huge job losses caused by the Great Recession forced more people to switch to service jobs. Many long-term unemployed people have struggled to survive by taking odd jobs, for which they almost invariably get paid in cash. But the biggest contributor to the underground economy in the past few years has been employers increasing their use of freelancers or “independent contractors” – even many who actually work full-time. The weak U.S. economy has already given businesses plenty of incentives to cut costs by paying workers under the table. But the arrival of Obamacare Jan. 1 – particularly rules that requireemployers with 50 employees or more to offer health insurance while allowing them to avoid offering plans to part-timers — will give them even more. “This type of regulation could put more people out of work and into an underground economy,” Peter McHenry, an assistant professor of economics at the College of William & Mary, told CNBC. It’s a sea change in how businesses traditionally have hired, and if it sticks through a recovery of the U.S. economy, it will have grim implications for American workers. “Businesses are not angels, and they exist to make a profit,” Alexandre Padilla, associate professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver, told CNBC. “They are going to do everything they can to keep costs down, and if that means paying people off the books, they will do it. The government doesn’t really have the resources to track down every business that does this.” What the Underground Economy Costs The rapidly growing amount of unreported wages in the U.S. is costing the nation billions in lost tax revenue. The Internal Revenue Service estimated that the losses from unreported wages have grown from about $385 billion in 2006 to about $500 billion last year. State governments lose another $50 billion to the overall underground economy. That means the people who play by the rules are getting a raw deal. “Those working and not paying the taxes put the burden on those who pay the tax,” David Fiorenza, an economy professor at Villanova University, told CNBC. “Taxes could be lower if the government were able to capture the underground economy instead of raising taxes on those currently paying the various income and payroll taxes.” Even the workers getting paid under the table don’t get off scot-free. They forfeit contributions to Social Security, which will greatly reduce benefits in their retirement years, and get no healthcare, paid vacation or other benefits. And they may end up with lower average pay to boot. “People who do these types of jobs run the risk of getting exploited with lower pay or not being paid at all,” Laura Gonzalez, professor of personal finance at Fordham University, told CNBC. “There could be more exploitation if more people are forced into this type of economy.”

Source: marketoracle.co.uk http://mafiatoday.com/2013/05/page/10/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/03/29/how-to-prevent-another-financial-crisis-make-wall-street-pay/

Uncover - Zara Larsson (Official Music Video)

Tourette syndrome

Tourette syndrome (also called Tourette's syndrome, Tourette's disorder, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, GTS or, more commonly, simply Tourette's or TS) is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. These tics characteristically wax and wane, can be suppressed temporarily, and are preceded by a premonitory urge. Tourette's is defined as part of a spectrum of tic disorders, which includes provisional, transient and persistent (chronic) tics. Tourette's was once considered a rare and bizarre syndrome, most often associated with the exclamation of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks (coprolalia), but this symptom is present in only a small minority of people with Tourette's. Tourette's is no longer considered a rare condition, but it is not always correctly identified because most cases are mild and the severity of tics decreases for most children as they pass through adolescence. Between 0.4% and 3.8% of children ages 5 to 18 may have Tourette's; the prevalence of other tic disorders in school-age children is higher, with the more common tics of eye blinking, coughing, throat clearing, sniffing, and facial movements. Extreme Tourette's in adulthood is a rarity, and Tourette's does not adversely affect intelligence or life expectancy. Tourettes: I Swear I Can't Help It

I Have Tourettes (HBO 2005) from Morrealefilms on Vimeo.

Why Love

Jean Duncombe ponders the interdependency of women’s self-worth and romantic relationships Is this a good time for me to be reading how much love hurts? My husband, who loved me dearly, died almost three years ago. His love gave my life meaning. Not a very feminist statement, I know, and friends tell me I should learn to “love myself” and gain validation from myself. But I miss having love in my life. Eva Illouz’s new book, hailed as an “emotional atlas” for the 21st century, offers words of warning to those who, like me, still hanker after romantic love. Think carefully before you venture along that road. The organised marital relationships of Jane Austen’s day, and the model of love as pure emotionality that followed, are both long gone, she says. Instead, the search for love today, while it looks like free choice, “entails engagement with a complex affective and cognitive market apparatus to evaluate partners”. Yet despite this complexity, we (women) need to understand it more than ever because it is the way we constitute our self-worth. For those of us with busy working lives, internet dating sites are frequently recommended as the best way to find love. Through words and photos we can reinvent ourselves, and behave like consumers rationally setting out lists of attributes like a buffet table (age, appearance, lifestyle). The subsequent “romantic encounter” is the result of the best possible choice, “perfect” or “good enough”. This modern way of finding a romantic partner may seem straightforward, but there are drawbacks. Rationality and regulation destroy the erotic, and the belief in endless choice inhibits rather than promotes commitment. Conversations (what Illouz calls “thick talk”) with friends are a key part of the choice process. With friends we spend a great deal of time reflecting on relationships, agonising over mistakes and hoping new relationships will avoid past errors. Partner choices are frequently framed within well-trodden narrative formulas and visual cliches from Hollywood films, novels and women’s magazines. The media promote the view that we will know “the right man” when we see him: we will look across a crowded room and recognise our soulmate, we will “click”. Illouz says it is too simple to call these beliefs false consciousness. She cites Simon Blackburn that love is not blind. You see each other’s faults. But you forgive them and, through forgiveness, the self-esteem of the loved one increases. Through love we become who we imagine ourselves to be. Love validates us and gives us a sense of self-worth. However, despite our continuing search for Mr Right, today there is an added problem in achieving romantic perfection. Integral to modernity is irony. Illouz cites David Halperin that true sexual passion requires the elimination of irony. This irony, uncertainty and sometimes cynicism about “real love” leads to another new dimension of the choice process, which Illouz calls “emotional interiority”. When seeking a relationship we engage constantly in self-scrutiny. What sort of person am I really? What sort of person do I really desire? When I am in a relationship, how do I really feel? How long will this love last? It is a modern belief, she argues, that such reflexive self-understanding will help us to better understand ourselves and our choices. But again, Illouz draws our attention to the drawbacks of introspection. Choices are harder. Modern introspection creates ambivalence, a sense of dissatisfaction about never fully knowing what our “true” feelings are. Here Illouz condemns the ease with which today we seek psychological or psychoanalytical explanations about who we are, and about past romantic disasters. We all too easily locate failed love lives in private histories. We too quickly explain our pain (real or imagined) as a product of deficient childhoods, where perhaps we were neglected, abandoned or distanced. Our love preferences are questioned as re-enactments of early parent/child relationships. Alongside talking to friends and ourselves, there is a whole battery of “relationship experts” who offer to come to the rescue with our doubts about relationship formation and/or breakdown. There are psychological counsellors, couple therapists, mediation specialists. All of private life is now to be shared and talked about - more “thick talk” - and these therapies provide, she says, a formidable arsenal of techniques to make us “verbose but inescapable bearers of responsibility for our romantic miseries”. Illouz comments with surprise that the cultural prominence of love today is associated with the decline in men’s power in families and the rise (she says) of more egalitarian/symmetrical gender relations. But the drawback of such equality, she suggests, is a decline in eroticism. She draws out the contradictions between our endless idealisation of love set alongside irony and ambivalence. There is acknowledgement that relationships, whether marriage, remarriage or cohabitation, frequently break down. Optimistic searches for a new romantic partner therefore carry within them an inbuilt expectation of disappointment. It is too easy, Illouz suggests, to blame feminism for the “crisis in love”. Feminism in the 1970s and 1980s drew our attention to the ways that marriage benefits men more than women, that love obscures gender inequalities and that struggles for power lie at the core of love and sexuality. Yet while men have become commitment-phobic, self-centred and sex-seeking, and more women have careers, women still seek intimacy and exclusivity in heterosexual romantic relationships. But instead of identifying institutional causes for their romantic misery - namely an acknowledgement that love is shaped and produced by concrete social relations - they seek explanations in psychodynamic theories of masculinity, or neuroscience and evolutionary biologists’ explanations about hormones, brains and chemical processes. She rather drily cites the research finding that men are biologically programmed to stay in love for only two years. Men’s commitment-phobia, and in many cases their reluctance to have children, do not necessarily lead to relationship breakdown. Instead, mirroring many of the findings in our research on couples (Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden), Illouz finds that women “engage in performativity”, an ongoing and constant production of sentiments. They perform “detachment”, trying not to appear too needy. But it is self-knowing, and they acknowledge their lack of authenticity. Managing the relationship becomes a complex power game, with all performances carefully self-monitored. Overall there is much to criticise in this book, including its focus on heterosexual middle-class women at the expense of ethnicity, working-class and gay and lesbian relationships, as well as men; its lack of clarity about “modernity”; and its somewhat ambitious claim to do to love what Marx did to commodities. I also have no doubt that there will still be a sizeable lobby in sociology who would prefer “love” and “romance” to be left to the psychologists, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists. Yet even if you disagree with its claims, this is a bold, thought-provoking book, and I laughed in recognition at some of Illouz’s descriptions of self-scrutiny. It is full of interesting questions. Why is self-worth, for so many women today, not achieved through our economic and social status? Why do women need love as affirmation of self-worth? The book concludes by asking sociology why it is so good at studying social suffering, yet fails to take more account of how our consumerist capitalist culture causes so much suffering in love relationships today; why love is so easily dismissed as mere ideological underpinning to gender and family but yet not seen, as Illouz explains, as “shaped and produced by concrete social relations, circulating in a marketplace of unequal competing actors, and part of a set of social and cultural contradictions that structure our modern selves and identities”. Indeed, why does sociology not see that love is central to understanding modernity? http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/419788.article Ruth Ann - Believe In Me Ruth Ann - Letter To Heaven