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Monday, January 29, 2018

Davos Sovad: Off-piste pissing

 “Inevitably, in Fifty Two Burn Street
The past comes up to strike me like a rake
Stepped on in taxing innocence.”
All my Slavic friends are homeless
They do not even have tents

Were I to seek a safe place
I would run nights lost
Ice pelting my face

Sent the wrong way
Whenever I ask —

Afraid to run back,

Each escape the last


Davos making Trumps and other rich ali babas and kleptomaniac cryptocurrency thieves great again ...

Corporation tax breaks kept secret to avoid 'harsh criticism': FOI documents



Amazon Scores Two More $5+ Billion Bids


More grifting, Amazon-style.
A non-blogging friend points me to the announcement today of Maryland’s subsidy bidthat puts Montgomery County into one of the 20 finalist slots. Shockingly, Governor Larry Hogan (R-MD) put in a bid that would pay Amazon almost the entire cost of its facility, depending on what you think a proper discount rate should be now (hint: low).
 

62% of senior staff at HMRC over 50 years old ... ATO is not much younger  

Tom Coomer has retired twice: once when he was 65, and then several years ago. Each time he realized that with just a Social Security check, "you can hardly make it.
Americas reluctant septuagenarian workforce


Trend Reversal of Old-Age Labour Force Participation in Germany



Why has workforce participation increased among older age groups in Germany?  Follow the money.
Inquality and Wealth Distribution in Germany Der Speigel. “I’d rather be in the bottom in Germany than here for sure.”


The role of accountancy firms in Carillion’s collapse is bigger than we thought Left Foot Forward. Dowsers, this is really bad. And who (well you will see “who”) would be dumb enough to be an “outsourced internal audit manager”? That is a prescription for eating huge amounts of liability, particularly since you are at risk of adverse selection.

Migrant small business report


EY Sweeney
CGU INSURANCE
Nine in ten of all Australian businesses are small businesses, accounting for 33% of Australia’s GDP and employing over 40% of Australia’s workforce. What may surprise some, is that one third of Australian small businesses are owned by migrants.


 George Soros calls Facebook and Google a ‘menace’ to society and ‘obstacles to innovation’ in blistering attack Business Insider



Sydney private school fees soar past $37,000


Netherlands' spy service caught Russian hackers 'Cozy Bear' on tape, Dutch media claims


The Netherlands' spy service has broken into computers used by a powerful Russian hacking group and may be sitting on evidence relating to the breach of the US Democratic National Committee, according to Dutch media reports.


Offshore Account Defendant Sentence with Court Accepting Government's New Position on Guidelines Calculations 

 DOJ Tax announced here the sentence for Hyung Kwon Kim for an FBAR violation.  (Note that the announcement identifies the defendant as Huong rather than Hyong, but Hyong appears to be a misspelling of his first name per the underlying documents.)  I previously blogged on Kim's guilty plea.  Another FBAR Plea And Notice of Government Change of Position on Applicable Guidelines(Federal Tax Crimes Blog 10/27/17), here

Davos cartoon

Global political leaders and business people are gathering for the annual 
 World Economic Forum, which is due to start today in the Swiss ski resort
 of Davos. To mark the event, Schrank has drawn a cartoon in The Independent 
showing the world as a skier going off the edge of a cliff. An onlooker remarks: 
"I kept telling him not to go off-piste".

Commentary: "Off-piste skiing" typically refers to any skiing away from controlled trails and slopes. The inference is that by straying from tried and tested (economic) models and taking too many risks, the world (economy) has lost control and is now plunging into the void. 
Qualcomm Just Got Fined $1.23 Billion for Illegal Apple Payments Fortune. Resilc: “Apple is a crime scene. Kickbacks and tax fraud.”

Turnbull's tax cuts a political stunt that ignore a hard truth


For the past few weeks, I've been mounting the argument that it's time for interest rates to start rising in 2018. That's partly because it's no longer clear the economy is weak enough to justify the emergency, record low setting of monetary policy.

Leaked Docs Show Abbott's Crew Proposed Ditching Centrelink For Under-30s



Jodi McKay

This was not The Cat's domain 


‎
He called it “f..k you money” and millionaire media executive Antony Catalano wanted even more of it. It's the kind of money that makes a former newspaper cadet his own boss; that buys a boutique hotel in Australia's premier beach resort and, for good measure, a private jet and luxury yacht. It's the kind of money that could ...



Davos 2018: The liberal international order is sick Martin Wolf, FT. “[Princeton’s John Ikenberry] summarises: ‘The crisis of the liberal order is a crisis of 
legitimacy and social purpose.'”
Economic worries surface at Davos Handelsblatt. Big pulled quote from Rogoff on debt. Grifters gotta grift…
The Davos non-paradox Stumbling and Mumbling

Anti-globalist Trump declares America 'open for business' in Davos speech



George Soros in stark Davos warning against US tech giants




 Dark Money, Not Russia, May Be the Best Way to Explain Trump’s Win Vice. Nice to see Ferguson in a popular venue (and see alsoNC, 2018-01-12). Includes an interview with Ferguson. This caught my eye:

Who were these people taking a chance on Trump when he looked doomed in the polls? That infusion of money, even after re-reading your report, is hard for me to make sense of.
I think it’s one of the greatest out-of-the-money options in world history, basically, and they thought they could pick it up cheap. And they’d at least take a flier on it. By comparison, Silicon Valley looks almost sedate next to some of the private-equity guys




“Our new report about the state of inequality in the world reveals how our economy is delivering unimaginable rewards for those at the top by exploiting millions of ordinary workers at the bottom…Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven  times over. 82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, and nothing went to the bottom 50%. Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men. Governments must create a more equal society by prioritizing ordinary workers and small-scale food producers instead of the rich and powerful.”

“The inequality crisis is worsening. 82 percent of the wealth created last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity got nothing. Our broken economy is widening the gap between rich and poor. It enables a small elite to accumulate vast wealth at the expense of hundreds of millions of people, often women, who are scraping a living on poverty pay and denied basic rights.”


See also the Washington Post – Why it costs so much to be poor in America

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny arrested as thousands protest against Putin

Strava just published details about secret military bases, and an Australian was the first to know



Remember Piers Morgan? Well, he too was in Davos

Veni, vidi, vici  ("I came, I saw, I conquered"), Julius Caesar wrote the Roman Senate in 47 BC after a military victory. For British talk host Piers Morgan it was more like "I came, I saw, I sucked up" in 2018 as he interviewed President Donald Trump.
Stephen Colbert had his opening Monday monologue essentially written for him as a result of an interview conducted in Davos, Switzerland, by Morgan, the onetime failed Larry King successor at CNN who is now back in London as star host of "Good Morning Britain" on ITV. And while Colbert's fodder were the many factual errors (or outright falsehoods) Trump spewed (including on global warming), there was also the similarly cocksure journalistic modus operandi of Morgan.
As Ed Power of the Daily Telegraph put it a few hours earlier, "Piers Morgan’s world exclusive interview with Donald Trump (ITV) was a towering feat of journalism, yielding scoops by the platterful and revealing the Commander-in-Chief to be thoughtful, humane, witty and a shoo-in for the manager’s job at Arsenal."
"Don’t take my word for it — just ask Morgan who, not satisfied with cornering Trump for a 45-minute chinwag at the Davos World Economic Forum, was also considerate enough to furnish his own running commentary on how the interrogation was going."
Yes, for starters, " 'Some remarkable revelations here … he tweets in bed,' went a breathless Morgan voiceover." Power aptly referred to this encounter between "Twitterdom’s two great self-publicists" and informed (at least for us ignorant souls across the ocean) that it been marketed to the hilt given "the many blockbusting revelations Morgan had supposedly inveigled from the President."
And not that this would remind us of any U.S. television host — can you imagine! — but Power said that the air of occasional tough-mindedness aside, "Morgan had come to gild as much as to grill." There was mention of Morgan himself appearing on "Celebrity Apprentice" in 2008 and having found his subject tough but fair. Yes, the big suck-up.
And then there was this line, which does unintentionally suggest that big-time TV interviews can exhibit a certain ego-driven common denominator in this fashion: "The interview in truth revealed more about Morgan than the President, who radiated his usual forcefield of bluster."
Morgan has cut a tough-guy, no-holds-barred image as a morning show host — figure a beefier Chris Cuomo with a Brit accent — and apparently just loves "his Mr. Nasty image." But, as even just the clips Colbert played last night let on, it was "a persona he appeared to have left on the luggage carousel at Davos airport."
Perhaps it was the rarified and genteel air of the elite gathering surrounding them, but Morgan morphed from "the jackhammer-tongued villain of breakfast telly" into a "fine-tuned flattery-dispensing machine."
"He looked a bit like one of those novelty nodding bird toys as Trump outlined what he described as the record breaking performance of the U.S. economy office since he took office. 'A lot of people don’t want to give you credit,' growled GMB’s vicious attack dog. “ 'But] a lot of that is indisputable.' "
So, too, the groveling, with its own inherent reminders of the pathways to success in the TV business for a slice of our most prominent practitioners. Morgan was a two-legged vessel for fake news, which is perhaps perfect for this confusing era. Colbert spliced together a spoof of Morgan, with him seemingly interviewing Trump, calling it an "Exclusive Fake Interview."
It almost made one yearn for Larry King, if not Julius Caesar. 
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