Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Global Wealth: Heads in the sand and Cult of Excess

Prime Minister and former merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull has warned of a "cult" of excessive executive pay among Australia's chief executives and suggested shareholders and the community were losing their tolerance for the multi-million dollar pay packets  CEOs pay a 'cult of excess': Malcolm Turnbull

'He crossed a line': Fox News anchor turns on Trump




Via Linda Hutt River reign enters a new era


Just make the wealthy pay their taxes


The New Daily



The ATO has formed an opinion of 'fraud' or 'evasion

SMSFs hit $10m in assets at the rate of 25 a month

The Australian Government significantly expands ATO powers to ...



NICHOLAS EBERSTADT: Our Miserable 21st Century
On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood anything about.
Senate Dems ask DHS inspector general for probe of Trump’s business arrangement The Hill. This looks lame. One of the rules of politics is to focus on winnable fights. As Jerri-Lynn discussed quite a while back, the Emoluments Clause is a non-starter as far as Trump is concerned. Why are the Dems not fighting on policy issues?




10 Great Novels On Freedom Of Expression That Aren’t ‘1984’



Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happpen Here is on the list, as is Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (They didn’t need to include The Handmaid’s Tale.) But there are also titles by Mario Vargas Llosa, James Baldwin, Katie Kitamura, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jean Brunner, Antonio Tabucchi, and Viet Thanh Nguyen 



Max Méndez Beck phrased it this way:
what do you think is the most multicultural (minimal segregation while having great ethnic diversity) city in the world?
Toronto springs to mind as a candidate, but it is increasingly expensive and perhaps more ethnically segregated than it used to be or at least more segregated by income and class.  Montreal is gaining on it by this metric.  Sydney is likely in the top ten, but too many parts are posh to be #1.  Sao Paulo has so many ethnicities, but when you get right down to it they are all Brazilians.  Don’t laugh, but Geneva might be in the running, both because of immigrants crowded near the center and the city’s international organizations.  But perhaps I will settle on Brooklyn, which if it were its own city would be the fourth largest in the United States.  (I love Queens, but have a harder time calling it a city.)  Brooklyn has recent arrivals from almost the entire world, and even the very nicest of neighborhoods are usually not so far from the poorer areas.  Still, if you refuse to count Brooklyn, it is striking that Montreal has a real chance of topping this list: wealthy enough to bring in foreigners, not so wealthy as to price them away.


Self-employment 'reduces tax take' as firms avoid responsibilities  
Booming gig economy costs UK £4bn in lost tax and benefit payouts, says TUC  
TUC Report: The impact of increased self-employment and insecure work on the public finances
EU and trade partners readying WTO challenge to US border tax 

Will Country-by-Country Reporting Help Identify 'Stateless Income'? 
Romanian parliament approves anti-corruption referendum  
Europe’s centre-left risks irrelevance if it can’t respond to the populist challenge   Canada misses out on nearly $50 billion in tax each year  
HMRC Report: Annual Report 2016 - The Code of Practice on Taxation for Banks 

Library Hand, the Fastidiously Neat Penmanship Style Made for Card Catalogs



Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca bosses refused bail following bribery scandal arrests   
Panama charges two Mossack Fonseca partners over Brazil link  

Canada: Bombardier: Master Class in Tax Dodging  
Trusts – Weapons of Mass Injustice: new Tax Justice Network report
Scots tax haven firm offers to help French avoid tax

New Ghana government commits to implementing beneficial ownership regime

Susan C. Morse (Texas) & Leigh Osofsky (Miami), Regulating by Example,  35 Yale J. on Reg. ___ (2017):
Agency regulations are full of examples. Regulated parties and their advisors parse the examples to develop an understanding of the applicable law and to determine how to conduct their affairs. However, neither the legal nor theoretical literature contains any study of regulatory examples or explains how they might be interpreted. This Article fills this gap.