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EU Overturns Agreement With US On Banking Data
Following the lead of the civil liberties committee which last week recommended dropping it (against the wishes of the US), qmaqdk writes "The EU parliament overturned the previous agreement with the US which allowed US intelligence agencies to access EU banking data."
Americans that want to avoid taxes, can now bank in Europe again. Soon the USA will follow suit and allow Europeans who do not wish to pay taxes to be shielded from Europe.
This is my sig.
Um, he's black? Duh.
Huh? This bank service had servers in the USA, and then, after 911 the transactions were under a secret investigation, and then, the bank service moved their servers to Belgium, and then, the USA obtained a secret agreement at the EU to continue tracking transactions, and then, got found out, and then, EU officials say, no. This is supposed to be a big "win" for democracy? Was this bank service, like, handling the transactions that finance world terror groups and insuring their privacy?
There is no valid reason for anyone to be able to have private bank data. Encouraging lies, cheating and tax fraud are not what nations should be about.
Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain are the worst but not the least. Most of the countries in Europe have spending and Debt levels that (as a percentage of GDP) are double the US level everyone is worried about. What the PIGS are is a test, because if the PIGS collapse the entire Eurozone is going to go down. Greece is the first action and how the EU reacts will dictate how the financial community values things going forward. If Greece isn't fixed your probably going to see a BIG drop in the Euro as everyone runs away in fear of a Eurozone collapse. In fact that fear may cause the collapse as a self fulling myth as the currency devalues. Things are stable right now, but if the public backlash in Greece against the public spending cuts that are being implemented goes badly you better move all your money out of Euro's.
If you don't think this is a big deal you are foolish (not responding to the OP, clarifying what you said). The account deficits and debt levels in the EU make the US look like we are fiscally frugal. All that spending is going to catch up some day, and the scary thing is the budgets in the EU don't have flexibility. 90% of EU spending is entitlements. Those are brutally hard to cut with massive public protests but at some point the rest of the world is going to stop loaning money for this spending and if it happens abruptly it could cause an economic collapse and run on the banks. The Euro is a fiat currency like the rest in the world, that basis of it's existence is trust that it's worth something. Economic collapse in the PIGS could trigger a massive run of devaluation on the Euro which would wipe out trillions in value overnight and destroy the economies of many of the EU nations. Ironically if such a collapse happens Germany and England are likely the only ones to survive it.