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December 27, 2013

De machtsgreep van de megalobbyisten - Opinie - De Morgen

 Sinds deze zomer onderhandelen de Europese Commissie en de VS over een Trans-Atlantisch Vrijhandels- en Investeringsverdrag. Hoe meer we te weten komen over deze onderhandelingen, hoe zorgwekkender de informatie. De onderhandelingen verlopen niet transparant. Industriële lobby's zitten mee aan de onderhandelingstafel. Het Europese parlement, de nationale parlementen, de middenveldorganisaties, vakbonden, ngo's, kleine bedrijven en werkgeversorganisaties en burgers worden zeer beperkt geïnformeerd. Nochtans zal wat onderhandeld wordt een enorme impact hebben op ons samenlevingsmodel.

Controversieel is de discussie over het arbitragemechanisme voor investeringsbescherming (Investor-state dispute settlement, afgekort ISDS). Dat soort arbitrageovereenkomsten legt vast wat de rechten van investeerders zijn en hoe geschillen beslecht worden. Dat mechanisme zorgt ervoor dat bedrijven staten kunnen aanklagen voor internationale arbitragehoven. Boven de hoofden heen van nationale gerechtshoven en parlementen oordelen drie rechters over de aanklacht achter gesloten deuren.

De ISDS-regelgeving die de VS en Europa graag willen invoeren onder druk van de industriële lobby's, holt de democratie uit. Vermogende bedrijven gebruiken dit mechanisme om overheidsmaatregelen die de verwachte winst van de bedrijven mogelijks aantast, aan te klagen, zelfs al dienen deze maatregelen om de burgers of het milieu te beschermen. Te hallucinant voor woorden? Doemdenken? Neen.

 De machtsgreep van de megalobbyisten - Opinie - De Morgen

December 21, 2013

European Banking Union: Deal on Banking Union Will Test Goal of United Europe - by Andrew Higgens and David Jolly

Battling to defend its credibility after a series of troubled bank failures across the Continent, the European Union hoisted a long banner on the outside wall of its Brussels headquarters last year to trumpet Europe’s march “toward a genuine economic and monetary union.”

It was hardly a rousing battle cry. But it did at least acknowledge that despite the adoption of a common currency, the euro, Europe still had much to do to achieve real economic and monetary integration, a central pillar of the so-called European project since the early 1990s.

Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, after months of meetings in Brussels that often dragged into the wee hours, European finance officials finally reached a deal on how to plug a gaping hole in Europe’s economic defenses, agreeing to a centralized system to shut down sickly banks in the 17 member nations that use the euro.

But as with many of Europe’s grand ambitions, the construction of what was conceived as a solid banking union has been crimped by the often contradictory interests of different countries. The exercise has yielded more of a muddle than a unifying mission. A banking union has often been described as Europe’s most ambitious project since its decision in 1992 to establish a common currency. But the effort to create one has highlighted how difficult it is to act ambitiously for a bloc that has grown from six to 28 member states.

It has no clear shared view on whether it is the nucleus of a future European state, a free-trade zone, or merely an intergovernmental organization that irons out disagreements between countries. Add to this the fact that the bloc’s leaders have starkly different views of what caused Europe’s financial crisis and the long economic malaise that followed, and “it is no wonder the E.U. finds it so hard to take decisions,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a policy research group.

“You have a sick patient on the bed and doctors gathered around who cannot decide on the nature of the illness or the medicine required to cure the patient.

Read more: Deal on Banking Union Will Test Goal of United Europe - NYTimes.com

Turkey: Large Scale Government Corruption - as scandal-hit PM Erdogan presses police purge

Istanbul prosecutors Friday began charging some of the prime minister's closest allies in a huge graft scandal which he has responded to with a spectacular purge of the police.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he was battling "a state within a state" and described the corruption probe, which comes ahead of crucial March polls, as a smear operation.

The crisis erupted Tuesday when police detained the sons of three ministers as part of a sweeping investigation, one of the most brazen challenges to Erdogan's 10-year rule.

A total of 89 people, including several close Erdogan allies were detained in a series of dawn raids, sparking a crisis which rattled the stock market and sent the Turkish lira to an all-time low.

Media reports on Friday said that prosecutors had begun handing out corruption indictments, with the first eight formally arrested and placed in pre-trial detention.

They are suspected of numerous offences including accepting and facilitating bribes for development projects and securing construction permits for protected areas.

The remaining detainees were appearing in court Friday after being interrogated by police, according to local media.

Read more: Scandal-hit Turkey PM presses police purge - International - World - Ahram Online

The Dark Force: The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear

We have seen the enemy and he is us; the enemy(us) being zero interest rates and unlimited easy money round the globe that could become a worse bubble than the 2008 credit bubble. The only thing we have to fear is QE that lasts forever.

In the spring of 2008 the IMF predicted that the economy of the developed nations would grow by 3.8% in 2009. Instead, due to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, the economies of the U.S., Europe, Japan declined by 3.9%. That is a major mistake of prognostication. This preposterously optimistic forecast by the central bankers and establishment economists was shockingly wrong by a margin of almost 8%, indicating economists were totally unaware of the perfect storm of financial crisis descending on them.

These are the reputed establishment types who dominate enclaves like the IMF, as well as the Federal Reserve who are supposed to be measuring reality. The whole absurd farce reminds international economist William White (recommended to me by the soon-to-be Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer) of the comic strip Pogo. Pogo’s mantra was “We have seen the enemy and he is us!”

The “enemy” were the brains of the global economic system and they were duping themselves and each other, White suggests. They were so far inside the system they did not see the crisis that was on top of them. It takes an “outsider” to see that, White believes. As to the Bank of International Settlements, the BIS, where White once was a top economist, “we put out both public warnings as to the dangers as well as in our private reports to clients,” White tells me. ” But, the warnings were ignored.”

The problem is cultural and the result of the denial of the elite, according to White; a tale of seduction amongst the creators of 2008: “ borrowers, lenders, regulators, central banks, academics and politicians, [who] were each seduced into believing different things that were not true.” The relationship between these various parties also contributed to them having “no eye to see and no ear to hear,” White told a distinguished audience on October 24 in London, at a presentation entitled What Has Gone Wrong With the Global Economy? Why Were Warnings Ignored? What Have We Learned From the Experience?

I mean to tell you what lessons White has learned, and even though he is not a regular on CNN or columnist for the FT, Stanley Fischer (you’ll be hearing a great deal more about Fischer, once he becomes Vice Chairman of the Fed) assured me that White saw 2008 coming as early as 2003 in a paper White, then at the BIS, gave at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming conclave of central bankers. He had the vision and the intelligence to see the disaster coming. And he is predicting odds on another problem sooner or later.

So, what disaster did White warn me and you about that could be coming down the road? “Expansionary monetary policy…has its shortcoming… such policies have undesirable unintended consequences,” White explained in London. By undesirable, he means a much larger ‘too big to fail’ problem than we had before.

He means the creation of “zombie companies and zombie banks” that “have contributed to more risk taking and unjustified increases in asset prices.” To sum up, the crisis is not over.

White fears another catastrophe from the knee-jerk, ever more aggressive, overly long-lasting easy money policies espoused by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, to be inherited by Janet Yellen and Fischer once they are in place.

Here’s the gist of his warning. In the financial market crises of the past many decades — 1987, 2000, 2008 — the solution has always been the same, increase money supply and maintain rock-bottom low interest rates, says the former BIS economist and Canadian central banker. He is plainly worried about the outcome of a policy that just keeps printing more money aggressively with increasingly less positive results on economic growth than before.
White strongly questions his friend Ben Bernanke’s devotion to Quantitative Easing. What if the roots of fragility and accidents are just waiting to happen from being wrong about repeating over and over again the same excessive easy money policy? What if the Greenspan Put and the easy money that resolved crises in 1987, 1991, 1994, 2000, and 2008 are only a prologue for an even worse crisis that additional QE won’t solve?

White’s most intense fearsome nightmare is that the boom and rising bubble of home prices in Canada, Poland, Israel, Germany, Australia and New Zealand will eventually burst just as they did in the U.S. in 2007-2008, triggering another worldwide recession that the elite finance opinion makers will meet with an even more aggressive easing of money and lowering of the cost of money.

“Why do people believe what they believe?” White asks me on our hour-long transatlantic phone call. “People with influence over the system want us to believe that the system they prefer–more and cheaper money–is the best of all solutions for every crisis.”

What’s gone wrong is that ultra easy money policy is seen as a risk-free solution, even though the forecasting records based on easy money create forecasting records that are just too damned optimistic. “What if Bernanke’s faith in QE is the root of fragility and accidents waiting to happen?” White asks me. He has come to understand that there has grown an unstated alliance between economists and powerful interests, who have seduced each other into an unannounced alliance over a policy that benefits them in the short run, but may create more severe crises and disasters down the road.

In his October 24 London talk, White put it another way: “The Great Moderation, as Hyman Minsky would have predicted, generated the belief that the world had become a permanently less risky place.” The result of this mutual seduction was the manipulation of LIBOR, the reckless selling of toxic assets to unsuspecting buyers, and the hiding of highly leveraged risky activities in the off-the balance sheet shadow banking system.
As Pogo said: “We have the seen the enemy and he is us.”

The Financial Elite Who Gave Us 2008 Had No Eye to See and No Ear to Hear - Forbes

European Entrepeneurial Activities: Netherlands overtakes Ireland as No 1 for entrepreneurship

Ireland claimed the No 1 spot in the EU-15 countries in terms of the rate of entrepreneurship in 2005, with the Netherlands in ninth place that year. By 2012, however, the two countries swapped rankings.

Entrepreneur Watch: Ireland or the Netherlands: Which country is more entrepreneurial? illustrates the extent to which the Netherlands has overtaken Ireland in terms of business start-ups in the last 10 years.

For starters, the rate of new business start-ups in 2012 was 2.5 times higher in the Netherlands than Ireland, and more people in the Netherlands perceive entrepreneurship to be a desirable career choice while more Irish entrepreneurs report their motivation is that there was "no better alternative".

Other key findings include that while Ireland ranks higher than the Netherlands in terms of ease of doing business and ease of starting a new business, the Dutch policy of reducing rules and regulations, reducing direct interventions targeted at business and diverting savings towards lowering taxes on business have produced an environment that is more business friendly and encouraging of start-ups.

Read more: Netherlands overtakes Ireland as No 1 for entrepreneurship - analysis - Start Ups - Start-Ups | siliconrepublic.com - Ireland's Technology News Service

December 20, 2013

Trade: US trying to push for controversial new trade standards in trade negotiations

The US is pushing for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation, according to two internal memos obtained by The Huffington Post.

The memos, which come from a government involved in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations, detail continued disputes in the talks over the deal. The documents reveal broad disagreement over a host of key positions, and general skepticism that an agreement can be reached by year-end. The Obama administration has urged countries to reach a deal by New Year's Day, though there is no technical deadline.

One memo, which was heavily redacted before being provided to Huffington Post, was written ahead of a new round of talks in Singapore this week. Read the full text of what HuffPost received here. (Note: Ellipses indicate redacted text. Text in brackets has been added by a third party.) Another document, a chart outlining different country positions on the text, dates from early November, before the round of negotiations in Salt Lake City, Utah. View the chart here. Huffington Post was unable to determine which of the 11 non-U.S. nations involved in the talks was responsible for the memo.


EU-Digest

December 13, 2013

The Netherlands: While Dutch Taxpayers suffer Yahoo, Dell Swell Netherlands’ euro 9.5 Trillion Tax Haven - Jesse Drucke

Inside Reindert Dooves’s home, a 17th- century, three-story converted warehouse along the Zaan canal in suburban Amsterdam, a 21st-century Internet giant is avoiding taxes.

The bookkeeper’s home office doubles as the headquarters for a Yahoo, Inc offshore unit. Through this sun-filled, white- walled room, Yahoo has taken advantage of the law to quietly funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in global profits to island subsidiaries, cutting its worldwide tax bill.

The Yahoo arrangement illustrates that the the Netherlands in the heart of a continent better known for social welfare than corporate welfare, has emerged as one of the most important tax havens for multinational companies. Now, as a deficit-strapped Europe raises retirement ages and taxes on the working class, the Netherlands’ role as a euro 9.5 ($13trillion) relay station on the global tax-avoiding network is prompting a backlash.

The Dutch Parliament has debated the fairness of its tax system this year as lawmaker from several parties, including members of the country’s governing coalition, say they want to remove a stain on the nation’s reputation.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, declared a war on tax avoidance and evasion, which it said costs the EU 1 trillion euros a year. The commission advised member states -- including the Netherlands -- to create tax-haven blacklists and adopt anti-abuse rules. It also recommended reforms that could undermine the lure of the Netherlands, and hurt a spinoff industry that has mushroomed in and around Amsterdam to abet tax avoidance.

Attracted by the Netherlands’ lenient policies and extensive network of tax treaties, companies such as Yahoo,Google Inc, Merck & Co. and Dell Inc. have moved profits through the country. Using techniques with nicknames such as the “Dutch Sandwich,” multinational companies routed 10.2 trillion euros in 2010 through 14,300 Dutch “special financial units,” according to the Dutch Central Bank. Such units often only exist on paper, as is allowed by law.

Unfortunately so far, all the politicians have done is talk and more talk. The question one would ask now is do Governments really want to change their tax structures or is it all political hogwash?

EU-Digest