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Journalist Arrested In Greece For Publishing List of Possible Tax-Evaders
kyriacos writes "The Greek government is charging journalist Kostas Vaxevanis with violation of the data privacy law for publishing a list of about 2,000 Greeks who hold accounts with the HSBC bank in Switzerland. While more and more austerity measures are being taken against the people of Greece, there is still no investigation of tax evasion for the people on this list by the government. The list has been in the possession of the Greek government since 2010."
Evading tax is every Greeks' right and what has made Greece the economic powerhouse it is today.
Tax records are public documents in Finland. In fact, they are published as an annual bestseller (two pieces of information are listed: the reported annual income and the total tax).
The logic is the same as with court records. The citizens need to be able to trust that the tax system treats everybody fairly.
That's not the real scandal, or should I say is part of it. The real scandal is that the list has been in the government's hands for a couple of years and it has done nothing about it ( it's the same list leaked by a swiss man, and bought and used by the german, US and other governments to collect taxes ). Ex-ministers are saying that a) either they couldn't use the list because the data was not acquired legally or b) we gave the list to the greek IRS but they didn't do anything. There is even an ex-minister ( current leader of pasok ) who admitted he took the usb stick with the list to his home after he resigned from his position.
Yes everybody pull your money out because that will make it better.
The difference between a Swiss bank and a bank in another European country is that Swiss banks don't share information about the account balance with the governments of their respective clients. So while having a Swiss bank account doesn't necessarily mean someone is evading taxes, the vast majority of the people evading taxes will use Swiss bank accounts.
Hey many billions -- nay, TRILLIONS -- of dollars have wealthy individuals from around the globe hidden in Swiss bank accounts?
Under any other circumstances, nations would ban trade with Switzerland unless it shared bank account data with their local tax office. Alas, it's the same fat cats that run our countries who shield their wealth in Switzerland.
It was eye opening when that disgruntled IT fellow burned a copy of bank account data onto a couple of DVD's and then embarked on a global tour of selling to each country a list of their citizens who had money stashed in Switzerland.
Is he still alive?
Actually getting out of the Euro would probably be a smart thing, as they will frankly NEVER be able to pay back the loans and most likely the people will revolt over the measures being imposed on them in return for the loans.
Whether you agree or disagree with the direction Greece is headed you simply can't force the people to accept what essentially was a crooked deal between the large banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs (Why am I not surprised that GS was involved? I swear they are Wolfram & Hart, and I wouldn't be shocked if their board was demons in Gucci suits) and the former government.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The irony about gold is that the current high price is the result of an artificial bubble maintained by gold sellers pushing the staying power of gold. You didn't think those advertisements telling you to buy gold were for your own good, did you? No, they are to drive the price of gold high and keep it that way.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Hey many billions -- nay, TRILLIONS -- of dollars have wealthy individuals from around the globe hidden in Swiss bank accounts?
Since you ask, around 21-32 trillion: as much as the US and Japanese economies combined.
http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/The_Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_Presser_120722.pdf
That includes all off shore accounts, not just Swiss.
This is a classic case of government panicking when they lose control of information and thus power. I find when a government spends too much time controlling information they tend to forget what they are actually supposed to be doing. I love how this compares to a functioning government like Norway where you can access people's tax records online. There are a few odd rules though; there is a time window and I believe that people know who has accessed their records. Thus the open information includes knowing which of your neighbours are nosy. But the best part is the first year they went online the public found famous rich people claiming $150,000 in income resulting in investigations.
The ads are to hold the price up long enough for the early purchasers to convert to dollars.
There is a legitimate point that inflation is what Greece, Spain, Italy and Portual need. Now ideally they would get there from a eurozone inflation of target of 4% and ease through this gradually (as the US generally has), but the other option will be for the Eurozone to break up, and they would likely be first to be kicked out (unless the germans leave first, which would help too).
Inflation devalues debt. Since one persons debt is anothers holding you can see the issue. But of course most people don't have a lot of money in cash assets. They have houses and stocks and so on.
Rightly, what he's complaining about is that reducing the value of a currency can make your labour worth less. This is true, and tied in concept to something in economics called nominal wage rigidity. Basically no one wants to take a face value pay cut. So to make your economy more competitive (more exports, more tourists, less imports, less of your people touring elsewhere) you want to reduce your own costs, and one way to do that is inflation.
Greece is essentially a balance of payments problem, all of the euro area is, combined with a monetary but not a fiscal union. If it wasn't for defence, medicare and medicaid and social security being *federal* in the US a lot of states would be in deep trouble right now. But because relatively rich areas keep sending money to poorer areas (especially areas that are poor because of the housing bubble and the now market bubble). What the greeks need is to decrease their costs relative to germany to attract investment, or get direct payments from germany. Either would work. The first, when in the Euro, is a mess, the Euro area could aim for a larger inflation target, essentially they'd decrease costs against everyone else at least, Greece might not be more competitive against germany but it would at least be more competitive against the US and Japan and China. The latter, which is essentially what the germans are talking about, European Federalism, seems to be a non starter politically.
So sure, he's shilling gold, and gold isn't a hedge against anything, it's just a metal that varies wildly in price, in part based on fears about inflation. Small persistent inflation (fiat currencies trend down) is a feature, not a defect of the system. But there's a kernel of truth to the fact that a lot of people in europe are looking at greece and figuring they want to having their money somewhere else, because if the Euro area starts kicking people out rather than actually solving problems a lot of people are going to get really fucked in the short term, and there they really might be better with bars of metal than cash. Incidentally, as other people have pointed out, this reality is why the barter system is picked back up, and is preventing major investment, so between that and austerity greece is only going to get worse unless there's some serious credible move towards an actual european solution, and given that, bars of any metal, even iron might be better than Greece Euros.
The ads are to hold the price up long enough for the early purchasers to convert to yuan.
FTFY
The folks at The Economist can explain that in more detail: http://www.economist.com/node/21555923
Although the Greek government is close to running a primary budget surplus (ie, before interest payments) it still needs further official loans to honour obligations due this year, notably redemptions of bonds held by the European Central Bank (ECB), which were excluded from the restructuring in March that slashed the face value of €200 billion of debt held by private bondholders by over half. If the lifeline from the EFSF were cut off by its creditor nations, Greece would be unable to pay those debts. And if the ECB makes it a matter of principle not to lend (or permit the Bank of Greece to lend) to banks against collateral consisting of bonds and guarantees from a government in default, then it in turn would cut Greece off. Greek banks currently rely upon some €130 billion of central-bank funding. Without the ECB money the entire banking system would collapse. If the flow of money was reduced, and the conditions it is lent on tightened, the Greek government might start to issue IOUs to its workers to make up the shortfall. If the flow stopped, leaving the banks no euros to pay out, a new currency would be the only alternative.
The government would redenominate domestic bank assets and liabilities into drachma and insist that domestic contracts, such as pay and prices, be also set in drachma. Capital controls would be necessary because the drachma would immediately fall against the euro, possibly losing 50% or more of its value in a trice.
In the short term Greece's economic agony—its economy shrank by 13% from 2007 to 2011 and is expected to contract by almost 5% this year—would intensify. A precipitous exit without preparation would leave the country without notes and coin. The surrounding chaos would paralyse economic activity, causing consumers and businesses to stop spending. Economists at UBS, a Swiss bank, have estimated that the cost of a catastrophic exit might amount to 40-50% of GDP in the first year.
That figure assumes that Greece would have to leave the EU as well as the euro, and thus lose access to the single market. On strict legal grounds that may be the case, in part because exit requires capital controls, and those controls are illegal under EU treaties. In practice European policymakers are making it clear they would do their utmost to keep Greece in the EU. Assuming such helpfulness, Mark Cliffe, an economist at ING, a Dutch bank, reckons that the effect would be less. He puts the first-year extra loss of output at 7.5%.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I undid many moderations to inform you, so appreciate it.
The Cayman Islands have signed enough tax-treaties to get into the "white list" of the OCDE. Google it or just read this.
Depending on your nationality and preferences, today you go to Singapore, Belize, Holland or Panama.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
... and believe it's some moral failure of the greeks in not paying their debts which has nothing to do with reality
not that i am a fan of further unification; care to elaborate how it's not a failure of the greeks? Who took those massive debts and spent everything on hookers and blow? Martians? Oh, those evul bureaucrats in government who schemed with foreign bankers and cheated the honest uncorrupted greek society... but who voted for them? Santa Claus?
Did they expect to load on debt ad infinitum to fund lavish welfare programs without any consequences?
Their taxes as a % of gdp and spending as a % of GDP were not radically different from the rest of the euro area for the last decade
so i guess you missed the fact they had no problem with lying their way into the monetary union, cooking the books every single year, marking everything to fantasy and doing that shady credit default swap business with GS to move shitton of expenses off the balance sheet. Yup, everything would be rainbows and ponies if only zee germans left them alone.