Tax evasion and white collar criminals
"Banking secrecy will no longer take place." With these words the German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble declared on October 27, 2014, in front of four European daily newspapers ("Les Echos", "El País", "The Times" and "Corriere della Sera") the international will of cope with tax evasion l.
His words fall within the framework of a global agreement on exchange automatic tax information that took place this past Wednesday, October 29 in Berlin. This one will try, for the year 2017, to solve the tax evasion towards tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland or Liechtenstein. Although it is considered an important step to curb corruption, and we do not question it, it is nothing more than a facade that covers other structures to carry out tax evasion. In this article We will try to outline what represents a common practice in times of crisis : a regulation that serves as a social pretext towards a growing deregulation of these illicit activities.
Financial capitalism
Financial capitalism becomes globalization. "Globalization is, in effect, driven by the profit of the banks, the speculators and the traffickers of multinational (American) firms and under the multiform domination of the hyperpower of the United States."[one]. The type of capitalism that is being imposed, especially the one that appears after the Cold War, is a globalized, deregulated and "financialized" model "Excessively. Of these three characteristics, the last one is the most outstanding. "Financialization" represents a "process by which financial services, firmly implanted, appropriate the dominant role in economy, culture and politics within a national economy [2] and worldl ". In order for finance to be established as such, it is necessary to open certain borders (globalization ) and the deregulation (or in other words, liberalization) of the economy of the states. Also, all this is accompanied by the development of new communication technologies (such as the Internet) and large multinational companies.
The financial capitalism It works on multiple levels but it is on the supranational (or global) scale that it finds itself in the greatest guarantees of progress, since financial capitals escape the state control, and therefore they are at ease. Since the State should be the regulator of the economy (the ideological foundations of the nation state ), the capitals would have to be framed in them, assuming their laws and regulations. The search for extreme profitability on a global scale, at levels far from the social reality, can cause imbalances given the "de-territorialization" of the economy, and causing periods of economic crisis.
The economic crisis of 2008: Context to reform the criminal bases of financial capitalism
It is commonly understood that the current economic crisis began in 2008 with the fall of the American bank of Lehman Brothers. But such blame of the aforementioned banking entity masks a deeper, more structural reality, whose resposibility has gone unnoticed in many homes. We refer to a criminal reality of the speculative practices of banks, especially the excess of credit (taking large risks) and the covert sale of toxic financial products . This reality appeals to white-collar criminals at the core of high-finance movements.
These financial "swindles" occur in moments of economic euphoria, when the control of the economy is eclipsed by the optimism of the markets. When the "speculative bubble" explodes-due to the inability to repay the debt by certain economic sectors or society-the bad practices of the banks are exposed, as we observed with the case of Bankia in Spain. In reality, what happens is a collapse in the productive structure. The large number of competitors within the financial sector leads to a progressive decline in the profit rate of financial monopolies, and forces them to change their strategy in order to perpetuate their dominance monopolistic / oligopolistic . Then, monopolies / financial oligopolies are directed to restructure the productive system legitimized by social urgency.
It is there where you try to regulate those "defects" of the capitalism or , with the aim of avoiding other relapses of the system and the political and social uproar.The evasion of capitals in tax havens would be one of the big problems. In Spain, just entering the economic crisis (2009), large companies evaded € 42,710 Million [3] (remember the 22,000 million € injected into Bankia by the State). However, parallel to the regulation of these structural defects, another monopolistic model of global fraud is being generated.
The "High frequency trading", New criminal structure?
The agreement on the exchange of tax information, instigated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) [4] and signed by 49 countries in Berlin on October 29, 2014, aims to provide confidence in society and markets. It seems that, at least from the beginning, it's good news.
But this new regulation is nothing more than a new mask for the criminal character of capitalism. In other words, the construction of new structural bases of the productive system that will serve to perpetuate the power of the monopolies / oligopolies in the production of new mechanisms of capital evasion.
High Frequency Trading or High frequency trading (in English) is a transaction technique that uses sophisticated computers capable of executing orders at high speed in order to take advantage of and take advantage of operating automatically when they find differences between prices over values [5]. It is a form of trading algorithmic that acts on a temporal scale far superior to the human. Thus, the human brain is replaced by algorithmic calculations and supercomputers, making the human more and more dispensable.
We are facing a new technological paradigm , based on artificial intelligence, which is nothing more than a new structure of financial engineering that favors a few people who own large capital. The regulation of tax havens , as we have been saying, it will be nothing more than a makeup service fiscal fraud if these new speculative practices are not regulated. The autonomous capacity of these large computers, the possibility of obtaining ultrafast benefits and even evading capital (since it is impossible to keep up with the speed of these mechanisms) contrasts with the global political turn against fraud.
The tax evasion , the economical crisis , the corruption ... they represent a hidden face of the reality of crime. The media focuses on highlighting the most visible acts but not those with the most social repercussions. Rodrigo Rato is an example of the impunity of white-collar criminals whose actions have a higher impact on society.
Bibliographic references
- [1] Yves Lacoste, Mondialisation et géopolitique, Hérodote. Revue de géographie et géopolitique, La Découverte, 2003, Paris.
- [2] Gayraut, Jean-François, Le nouveau Capitalisme criminel ("The New Criminal Capitalism"), Odile Jacob, 2014, Paris.
- [3] Union of technicians of the Treasury.
- [4] Exactly, it was the World Fiscal Forum, branch of the OECD, who organized the international agreement.
- [5] Gayraut, Jean-François, Le nouveau Capitalisme criminel ("The New Criminal Capitalism"), Odile Jacob, 2014, Paris.
