Citizens for Tax Justice in the USA have reported that:
On Thursday, Rep. Mark Pocan (WI-D) introduced the Corporate Transparency and Accountability Act, a bill which would require all publicly-traded multinational companies to disclose their revenues, profits, taxes, and certain other operations information on a country-by-country basis (CbCR) to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The measures in the bill are similar to the rules adopted by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) earlier this year with the key difference being that this information would be available to the general public.
I will be candid: I do not have great expectations of this Bill becoming law but the move is in the right direction, and that's very welcome.
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That’s rather a pessimistic outlook. Reminiscent of the remain camaign claiming Armageddon would ensue if the referendum result was leave.
What about equivalency? I thought a lot of financial institutions were keen on going down that route.
People didn’t vote leave with a view to ‘finding a way back’ once article 50 was triggered. They voted leave to leave. To leave the failing undemocratic, doomed EU. No one expected an easy ride. There will be difficulties and things will change. But we don’t have to be inward looking, we can trade with whoever we want, terms to be renegotiated.
That is hopelessly unrealistic and ignores the reality of a world that is rule bound
” .. if 172 MPs want a new job after Saturday I suggest that this is what they need to think about.”
I can’t think of a group of people less useful to the exercise than politicians.
Some very interesting points here Richard and well worth thinking about. In my view you are accepting too readily the ability of the Brexiteers to engender a hard Brexit (quite possibly including the break up of the UK) in blatant contradiction to what they promised during the referendum. However it is clearly not impossible.
Quite honestly I think it extremely unlikely that many politicians will do the kind of long term thinking you talk about it and if they do they will probably not want to make too much of it publicly. There is a little bit from David Davis at http://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2016/07/david-davis-trade-deals-tax-cuts-and-taking-time-before-triggering-article-50-a-brexit-economic-strategy-for-britain.html but he does not mention a decline in finance and looks pretty hopelessly optimistic already about trade deals.
One other point – if a hard Brexit and its economic consequences are unstoppable , what will that do for political stability ? Economic restructuring always seems to come with the painful bit first and any gains later and uncertain.
For example it will become clear that immigration is not the prime cause of problems in education , housing or health or the lack of decent jobs . Where is voters’ wrath to be turned next ?
I am doing hard analysis
The EU is making it clear there is no room for manoeuvre on migration
The UK is making it clear it must have control of migration
Hard Brexit follows
I think that is pretty much inevitable now
Everything else looks like spin
I agree that there has been some sort of phony war going on up to now, but history tells us that this only lasts so long before reality bites.
There will be winners and losers as a result of BREXIT and all we have to do now is keep a tally of the actuals to see if there are more of one than the other.
How big will the casualty list be?
All will be revealed – no doubt about that. But I know what I think………….
Richard, I remember in the aftermath of the referendum you said you thought that it was very unlikely that Brexit would ever happen and that you thought the only politician who would actually choose to invoke Article 50 would be Farage, and that the only chance of anyone invoking Article 50 was Cameron the morning after the referendum, and as he didn’t no one else will for the same reasons he could not.
Now you are saying a hard Brexit is pretty much inevitable. Have you changed your mind from your previous position that Brexit is unlikely to every happen? And if so, what is it that changed your mind?
Three things have changed
Theresa May and the folly of her appointments and obvious inability to appease her party, which is going to backfire badly
What that team have said
What EU countries have said
The facts have changed
I have changed my mind
It happens
Richard
Not before time! (joke)
Seriously, some of us made this kind of analysis some time ago, but (from our point of view) it’s good to see greater realism starting to be manifested even by diehards (no names , no pack-drill). For my own part, I’ve commented here before on what to me seemed the Alice-in-Wonderland outlook being displayed by all too many ‘Remainders’ (I voted ‘Remain’, btw, if that’s of the slightest interest to anyone).
To me your prohnosis seems pretty-well spot-on, although I do suspect that insufficient scope is being allowed for weasel words to work their magic in mitigating the harshness of the final outcome. It’s in neither side’s interests for UK and EU to be at daggers drawn for the foeseeable future and I do think that this will play a part. But it’s impossible to turn that vague feeling into specific examples, this early in the day.
I assume your point four refers to capital controls applied in most countries of the west not just UK.
Otherwise it would condemn us singly to pauperism. Even given multicountry adoption it would for UK decimate the financial service( City) sector and pulverise FDI.
We would have created a sinkhole without sand/cement available to fill it in.
It might actually be the exact opposite
Your response is dogmatic
Anyone who thinks that you’re being unduly pessimistic needs to speak to mid-level academics working in scientific research.
The worst is happening – has happened! – already. Everything that wasn’t inked in May is off the table – project funding, exchange programmes, postdocs, PhD’s – and gone. Permanently: nogone regards the UK as a partner or even a participant in the international endeavour that is 21st-Century science.
Everyone who was considering accepting an offer here, or making an offer to a UK academic on the assumption there would be funding, has already communicated their refusal and gone elsewhere.
Everything that was inked and signed and funded by May is proceeding in the certainty that the funding they’ve got won’t be renewed. It’s all about publishing the results they’ve got, closing down and moving on or, for projects in Europe with UK involvement, lining up local replacements and making an offer for the fortunate British academics who can seize the opportunity to emigrate.
The longest of these projects are the PhD’s at three years: everything else is on a one- or two-year time limit, and ticking down.
There is no joint funding in this year’s round and no prospect of any in a future; there will be no continuing involvement for the European postgrads and postdocs on exchanges and joint projects in the UK. They are not coming back when the funding ends, and they know it.
As do their British counterparts in Europe.
To reiterate: this is not something that might happen if we ‘Brexit’. It is happening now and, in truth, it has largely happened and it is both irrevocable and irrecoverable.
The ‘Hard Brexit’ has already happened for scientists in the UK, and it is not a ‘warning’ for the rest of us, it is the road that we all are on. The total absence of interest in Whitehall, Westminster and the media – no awareness, no effort, no action and absolutely no replacement funding – is the warning, for those who have the wit to heed it: we’re not just an island now, we’re an archipelago in which every company and every individual might as well be the sovereign government of Rockall.
Brexit is happening more slowly in Banking – it’s not project-based the way that academic science is – but it’s happenin and some of it has happened already. It will happen very fast indeed if the anti-foreigner sentiment that seems to be the ‘victor’ in this whole affair extends to closing our borders to white-collar wirkers as well as those that street-corner racists label ‘undesirables’.
I agree
In three or four years I will be looking to work at an EU university
How utterly depressing.
Even more so since not a single one of us is pure bred British – never mind pure English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish.
So that is immigration sorted…
Unless anyone dares to mention where we all came from?
Whilst the arguments bounced back and forth on this blog represent some of the best “thinking” on the Brexit consequences (in my opinion) I find myself increasingly at odds with the leave perpetrators.
When Mr Farage and his co-conspirators are dribbling into their bibs my grandchildren will be forced to deal with the consequences of their narrow vision for the UK.
What about legacy?
It was ignored
Brexit was an exercise in the moment
Like mid fullness. Except it was anything but mindful
Would not hard Brexit and controlling migration force the UK to close the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland? Is it possible to actually do this in practice?
Of course it is not possible
So a charade will be created
What do you think the charade will be? Passport controls between Northern Ireland and Britain? Or leaving the border open? But in the latter case the whole rationale of leaving the EU would come down.
And what happens if Scotland leaves the UK? Passport controls between Scotland and England?
We face mayhem
No one thought of that
And I doubt they are any closer to doing so as yet
What is needed above all is realism (which your article displays IMO).
What is NOT needed is pessimism – which is on offer in most comments here, in spades.
THEY ARE NOT THE SAME!
Just keep the “bottle half-empty/half-full” dichotomy in mind.