Good News on Tax Havens

The mega-research project on tax havens I told you about in November has borne its first fruit. In a data dump 160 times the size of that which put Bradley Manning and Julian Assange in jail, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has used over 2.5 million documents to publish the names of beneficial owners of numerous offshore accounts, based primarily in the British Virgin Islands.

According to the New York Times, the report "disclosed confidential information on more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts and nearly 130,000 individuals and agents, including 4,000 Americans." The headlines at the ICIJ website tell the story (though you should read them yourself):

"Dutch Banking Giants Help Clients Go Offshore"
"Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents"
"The Swiss Lawyers Who Help Europe's Richest Families Park their Wealth Offshore"
"French Banks Traded in Secrecy"
"Lawyers and Accountants Help Rich Manage Their Money"

The list goes on and on. Besides naming the names of the clients, however, the stories frequently highlight the enablers -- global banks, accounting firms, tax lawyers, and so forth -- without whom none of this would be possible.

This story is having special resonance in France, long a critic of tax havens and low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland. Prior to the ICIJ release, the country's budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, had been forced from office after it was revealed that he had offshore accounts and lied about it. Bad as it was to have the minister in charge of investigating tax fraud himself be a fraudster, the ICIJ release revealed that President Francois Hollande's campaign treasurer, Jean-Jacques Augier, had secret accounts in the Cayman Islands, though Augier denied any wrongdoing.

In response, Hollande on Wednesday announced a series of steps to deal with the scandals (via Tax Research UK), ordering his cabinet ministers to disclose their finances, appointing a special prosecutor, demanding country-by-country financial reporting by French companies (long proposed by the Tax Justice Network), and calling for the "eradication" of tax havens "in Europe and worldwide."

The data dump and French initiatives are not the only good news on tax havens. Luxembourg, one of the world's pre-eminent secrecy jurisdictions, announced that it would begin automatic account information exchange with the European Union, and that it was negotiating the same thing with the United States under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Previously, Luxembourg had only been willing to withhold taxes on foreigners' accounts and pay them anonymously to their respective EU national tax authority.

Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom announced that they would begin automatic account information exchange with each other.

Finally (via Tax Research UK), the European Union agreed to country-by-country reporting for EU companies in the extractive industries worldwide. According to the report, this is similar to, but stronger than, Dodd-Frank rules requiring publicly-held oil, gas, and mining companies to report all payments to foreign governments above $100,000 to be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The EU rules go further by including the logging industry as well as privately-held companies.

As if all this news weren't good enough, Richard Murphy at Tax Research UK says "there is more to come next week." Stay tuned.

How High Does Senior Poverty Have to Go?

It's official: President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security by replacing the program's current inflation adjustment with the stingier "chained" Consumer Price Index. As I've discussed before, this risks undoing all the progress made against senior poverty since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. 25% of seniors were poor according to official poverty line in 1968, compared to just 9.4% in 2006. Note, however, that the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes things like out of pocket health care expenses which hit seniors disproportionately, already shows a 16.1% rate by 2009. And our senior poverty rate, measured by the international standard of 50% of median income, is already 25%, much higher than most developed countries, more than three times Sweden's rate and over four times as high as Canada.

Why is Obama doing this? We just rejected the candidate who wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. Perhaps, as Krugman (link above) suggests, he chasing the fantasy of "being the adult in the room," but this is a losing proposition. As Brian Beutler points out:

Just like that, Chained CPI morphs from a thing President Obama is willing to offer Republicans into a thing Republicans dismiss as a “shocking attack on seniors.”

We've seen this game before. The Heritage Foundation's health care plan became "death panels" when President Obama endorsed it.  And, as Beutler's title makes clear, we have plenty of examples of the President negotiating with himself to bad effect, most notably in the 2011 debt ceiling battle.

If this cut really happens, Social Security benefits will steadily fall in true inflation-adjusted terms due to the magic of compounding. Moreover, with 49% of the workforce having no retirement plan at work and another 31% with only a grossly inadequate 401(k), the cuts will worsen the coming retirement crisis. The only question will then be: how high will senior poverty have to go before we do something about it?

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Trans Pacific Partnership Bad for the Middle Class: Just How Bad is the Question

What you don't know can hurt you. I think that's a clear lesson of some so-called trade agreements the United States has signed over the last 20 years, and illustrated further by the few that have been defeated, most notably the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from1995 to 1998, but then abandoned in the face of ever growing protests.

Haven't heard of the Trans Pacific Partnership? That's no surprise: while the negotiations are not really being conducted in secret (the Office of the US Trade Representative provides periodic updates here UPDATE 3/3/21: here is a working link for US negotiating goals), the level of disclosure from the USTR office rarely ventures beyond bland statements like this:

On November 12, 2011, the Leaders of the nine Trans-Pacific Partnership Countries - Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States - announced the achievement of the broad outlines of an ambitious, 21st-century Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement that will enhance trade and investment among the TPP partner countries, promote innovation, economic growth, and development, and support the creation and retention of jobs.

The USTR website continues by claiming that the agreement will be "increasing American exports, supporting American jobs." This is all too similar to the Clinton administration's reporting on NAFTA, which would point out all the gains from increased exports while omitting any mention of increased imports (Journal of Commerce, Nov. 18, 1994, via Nexis, subscription required) which quickly turned a small trade surplus with Mexico into a huge trade deficit.

How do we evaluate the TPP? We have to see it as having at least three major elements: a trade agreement, an investment agreement, and an intellectual property agreement.

From the trade agreement alone, we can conclude that it is a bad deal for the middle class. As I explained last year, the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem in economics tells us that more trade is actually bad for labor in this country, because by global standards, the U.S. is labor-scarce (low population density), meaning that we expect trade to lead to more intense competition in labor-intensive goods, putting downward pressure on wages. Alas, that isn't the end of it.

There is a lot of controversy about the investment side of the agreement. As discussed by my fellow contributor at Angry Bear (I repost many of my posts there), Daniel Becker, the investment chapter was leaked and published by the Citizens Trade Campaign. Before I discuss the TPP investment provisions, a little context on investment agreements first.

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),at the end of 2011 there were 3190 international investment agreements, of which 2860 were between two countries, usually known as bilateral investment treaties or BITs. Investment agreements can also be part of larger agreements, such as the investment chapter of NAFTA, the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS), and various regional trade agreements. Since the TRIMS agreement, in force since 1995, applies to all WTO members, it is a global benchmark; thus, people will refer to agreements with stronger provisions as "TRIMS+."

The purpose of investment agreements is to protect foreign investors, which are by definition multinational corporations (MNCs). At the same time, they place no corresponding duties on investors, only on the host government. Most significantly, these agreements remove dispute settlement from the host country's court system to binding arbitration in an outside body, most commonly the World Bank's International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). As with domestic arbitration clauses, this removal from the courts favors the business interests involved. So the investment agreement element of the TPP will tend to be bad for host governments (the U.S. is host to more foreign investment than any other potential TPP country) and by extension the middle class.

But "how bad" is the question. This depends on what restrictions the agreement puts on governments. Originally, MNCs wanted to be protected against having their property nationalized ("expropriated") by the host, but more recent agreements such as NAFTA's investment chapter (Chapter 11; text here) have opened the way to defining "expropriation" in ways that include regulatory actions that may reduce the value of the investment, even if they are non-discriminatory among firms and taken in the public interest. This is why I say above that investment agreements are bad for the middle class, because it normally benefits from public interest regulation.

For these reasons, there is in fact significant pushback regarding the content of investment agreements. Three good sources for this are UNCTAD, the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

So what's in the TPP investment chapter? As far as I can tell, nothing that isn't already in NAFTA, other U.S. free trade agreements, or a U.S. bilateral investment treaty. The problem is, that's bad enough. Under NAFTA, for example, Metalclad won a dispute against Mexico over a local government's refusal to grant it a permit to open a hazardous waste facility, and was awarded $16.7 million. Ethyl Corporation successfully challenged a Canadian ban on the import of gasoline additive MMT, leading Canada to withdraw the ban and pay the company $13 million in compensation. To have unelected bodies that (in the words of Citizens Trade Campaign) "would not meet standards of transparency, consistency or due process common to TPP countries’ domestic legal systems" overturning democratically adopted laws or regulations is profoundly undemocratic.

At the same time, I think Becker reads a little too much into some of the language. He quotes section 12-6bis (Becker's emphasis):

Notwithstanding Article 12.9.5(b) (Non-Conforming Measures, subsidies and grants carveout), each Party shall accord to investors of another Party, and to covered investments, non-discriminatory treatment with respect to measures it adopts or maintains relating to losses suffered by investments in its territory owing to armed conflict or civil strife.

 He goes on to speculate that this could give rise to compensation claims due to interpreting protests against the Keystone pipeline, or even strikes, as "civil strife." However, the exact same language is in NAFTA's investment chapter, and there have been no such claims in its entire history. Moreover, this is what we would expect since the language only pertains to government behavior ("it adopts"), not private behavior.

So, that's two strikes against the agreement. The third strike is intellectual property, something Matt Yglesias caught over a year ago. As I analyzed then, the TPP "would ban government health services from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies." Given that many countries already do this and the U.S. ought to do it to help rein in health costs, if these provisions stay in the final agreement it will be a very bad development.

Hooray for baseball season, but that's three strikes against the TPP. This is a bad deal that will put further downward pressure on real wages which have gone 40 years since reaching their peak, that will undermine governments' ability to regulate, and will strengthen a small group of pharmaceutical, software, entertainment, and publishing companies at the expense of the rest of us.

3/3/21: Thanks to reader Lisa G. for updating a dead link.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

EU Proposes Tighter Rules on Investment Incentives

The European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition is the EU equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice Anti-trust Division plus units for controlling domestic subsidies to industry. According to a new policy briefing from the European Policies Research Centre at the University of Strathclyde, DG-Competition has released a draft of new regulations on "regional aid" (subsidies to firms in poorer regions of the EU) that, among other things, includes tighter rules on investment incentives.

EU rules on subsidies to business have long fascinated me because they present a stark contrast to the totally unregulated bidding wars for investment we see here in the United States. As I have shown, EU Member States have been able to obtain investments with far lower subsidies than U.S. states have, even for the same company! A big part of this is due to the rules on regional aid, which specify the maximum subsidy each region can give to a business, and reduce that maximum for investments over € 50 million. The proposed rules for 2014-2020 go further than ever before.

The big change is that large firms would only be eligible for regional aid in areas with gross domestic product per capita below 75% of the EU average, that is, only in the poorest areas of the European Union (plus so-called "outermost regions" like French Guyana). Currently, countries are allowed to give subsidies in regions that are only poor relative to national standards, and every Member State has areas that qualify to give investment incentives to large firms.

This would be a gigantic change, as many whole countries would no longer be able to give investment incentives to large firms. These countries are:

Belgium
Denmark
Germany
Ireland
France (except for outermost regions)
Cyprus
Luxembourg
Malta
Netherlands
Austria
Finland
Sweden

 These countries would still be able to give regionally based investment subsidies to small and medium sized enterprises, which are defined as companies with fewer than 250 employees and either sales of less than or equal to € 50 million annually or a balance sheet of less than or equal to € 43 million.

If we did this in the United States, it would be the equivalent of saying that every part of the country with at least 75% of average per capita income would be barred from giving investment incentives, which of course would mean the poorest areas could give less than they do currently. This is obviously a political non-starter; we have to focus now on transparency and ending subsidized job piracy. But it's interesting to look ahead sometimes and see what kind of controls on subsidies are technically feasible.

Thanks to Fiona Wishlade, director of the European Policies Research Centre,  for sending this report to me.

Speaking of Inequality (with correction)

Travis Waldron at Think Progress pointed out this excellent article by David Cay Johnston. It dovetails well with my last post, which showed the fall of individual real wages and their failure to regain their peak fully 40 years after it was reached.

Johnston writes:

Incomes and tax revenues have grown from 2009 to 2011 as the economy recovered, but an astonishing 149 percent of the increased income went to the top 10 percent of earners.
If you wonder how that can happen, the answer is simple: Incomes fell for the bottom 90 percent.

While this data is at the level of tax filing households, it is consistent with what we see at the level of the individual. More nuggets from Johnston:

From 1966 to 2011, adjusted gross income in the bottom 90% grew a total $59 (2011 dollars, not the 1982-84 dollars I used in my last post) in 45 years, from $30,378 to $30,437.

"Candidate Bush said his tax cuts would make everyone prosper. But the real average pretax income of the bottom 90 percent in 2011 was $5,340 less than in 2000, a decline of more than $100 per week, or 15 percent, in pretax income."

The income share of the bottom 90% fell from 66.3% to 51.8% over the 1966-2011 period.


So we have seen inequality increase in pretax income plus changes in tax policy that have reduced the effective tax rates on corporations and capital gains, income which goes overwhelmingly to the rich. Thus, post-tax inequality is even worse than pretax inequality.

Johnston's report builds on the work of economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. Together with Facundo Alvaredo and Tony Atkinson, they have created the World Top Incomes Databases, very much worth checking out for a comparative look at U.S. inequality.

Correction: I initially saw Johnston's article linked from Think Progress, not Daily Kos, as I realized almost immediately after I hit the "publish" button. Apologies to Travis Waldron.

Real Wages Decline; Literally No One Notices

Your read it here first: Real wages fell 0.2% in 2012, down from $295.49 (1982-84 dollars) to $294.83 per week, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. Thus, a 1.9% increase in nominal wages was  more than wiped out by inflation, marking the 40th consecutive year that real wages have remained below their 1972 peak.

Yet no one in the media noticed, or at least none thought it newsworthy. I searched the web and the subscription-only Nexis news database, and there are literally 0 stories on this. So I meant it when I said you read it here first. In fact, there was little press coverage of the report at all, in sharp contrast to last year.

Below are the gory details. The data source is Appendix Table B-47, "Hours and Earnings in Private Non-Agricultural Industries, 1966-2012." The table has been completely revised since last year's edition of the report. The data is for production and non-supervisory workers in the private sector, about 80% of the private workforce, so we are able to focus on what's happening to average workers rather than those with high incomes.. I use weekly wages rather than hourly because there has been substantial variation (with a long-term decline) in the number of hours worked per week, from 38.5 in 1966 to 33.7 in 2012. The table below takes selected years to reduce its size.

Year     Weekly Earnings (1982-84 dollars)

1972     $341.73 (peak)
1975     $314.77
1980     $290.80
1985     $284.96
1990     $271.10
1992     $266.46 (lowest point; 22% below peak)
1995     $267.17
2000     $285.00
2005     $285.05
2010     $297.79
2011     $295.49
2012     $294.83 (still 14% below peak)

This decline is especially amazing when we consider that private non-farm productivity has doubled in this period:

 

But, if you've been paying attention, you know the drill: higher productivity plus lower wages = greater inequality. The question is, why aren't our media paying attention when real wages fall, yet again?

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

EU Chooses Bank Runs Over Fighting Tax Haven Cyprus

NPR's "Marketplace" reported Monday that the European Union planned to impose a tax on bank deposits in Cyprus of up to 10% to bail out the country's banks. This unprecedented action threatens to undermine confidence in banks throughout the eurozone periphery, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. As Louise Cooper told Marketplace, “(This move) says that your savings are not necessarily safe in a bank. What this risks is bank runs." Indeed, we could be literally hours from seeing bank runs in one or more of them.

What's the motivation for introducing such a risky policy? Cyprus is a tax haven; in fact, it's a favorite destination for the Russian mafia. Therefore, it's not enough to simply impose austerity on Cyprus; ordinary Cypriots have to give up some of their bank savings, too. So says the EU.

Methinks they doth protest too strongly. It's not like there aren't already tax havens in the EU, starting with the City of London and Luxembourg. Plus, for varying purposes, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland. This is not to discount Germany's efforts to pierce Swiss banking secrecy, which the United States should emulate (i.e., it should pay more informants to cough up information on U.S. tax evaders). Nor do I underestimate the difficulty the EU has had in getting its Savings Tax Directive passed in order to help stamp out intra-EU tax evasion, and the long way it still has to go.

Here's the thing: Cyprus was already a tax haven when it joined the EU in 2004. Germany, and the other 14 members of the EU at the time, knew this when they voted to approve Cyprus' membership (new members require a unanimous vote). If they didn't want to mess with another tax haven in their ranks, any one of them could have stopped it. But they didn't, so they are in no position to claim innocence now. Instead, they are going  to try to extract money from ordinary Cypriots (potentially exempting the first 100,000 euros for each depositor) rather than going after the bankers like Iceland did.

Let the bank runs begin!

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.