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There is something ridiculous about a tax system that encourages an American company to invest abroad rather than in the United States. But that is what we have.

“The fundamental problem we have in trying to tax corporations is that corporations are global,” says Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “It is very, very hard for national entities to tax entities that are global, particularly when it is hard to know where their income originates.”

Some international companies hate that idea, of course. They warn that we would risk making American multinational corporations uncompetitive with other multinationals, and perhaps encourage some of them to change nationality.

Which Corporate Taxation for America?

The current system, all agree, is deeply flawed: the corporate tax rate is too high by global standards, and the corporate tax base is too narrow, owing to numerous credits, deductions, and special provisions that distort economic decisions.

At the inception of the euro, it was thought possible to have a centralised monetary authority and decentralised bank supervision, but the inability to separate sovereign-debt problems from those of bank stability has led the leaders of the member states of the EU to agree to centralise supervision in the Single Supervisory Mechanism.

It got so bad that late last year Starbucks promised to pay an extra £10 million — about $16 million — in 2013 and 2014 above what it would normally have had to pay in British income taxes. What it would normally have paid is zero, because Starbucks claims its British subsidiary loses money. Of course, that subsidiary pays a lot for coffee sold to it by a profitable Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland, and pays a large royalty for the right to use the company’s intellectual property to another subsidiary in the Netherlands. Starbucks said it understood that its customers were angry that it paid no taxes in Britain.

“It is easy to transfer the intellectual property to tax havens at a low price,” said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist of Tax Analysts, the publisher of Tax Notes. “When a foreign subsidiary pays a low price for this property, and collects royalties, it will have big profits.”

it is especially hard for countries to monitor prices on intellectual property, like patents and copyrights.

Euro crisis based on ‘design flaws’ in monetary union, conference told

The European Central Bank’s current status, where it does not act as a ‘lender of last resort’ in a similar method to other central banks, was particularly criticised.

He said the current version of the treaty establishing the ESM, the new permanent bailout fund for the eurozone, would also not function as such a lender – and said it was “incapable of ending the crisis”.

The reason is not hard to fathom. Hobbled by severe damage to private and public-sector balance sheets, and with policy interest rates at or near zero, post-bubble economies have been mired in a classic “liquidity trap.” They are more focused on paying down massive debt overhangs built up before the crisis than on assuming new debt and boosting aggregate demand.

The sad case of the American consumer is a classic example of how this plays out. In the years leading up to the crisis, two bubbles – property and credit – fueled a record-high personal-consumption binge. When the bubbles burst, households understandably became fixated on balance-sheet repair – namely, paying down debt and rebuilding personal savings, rather than resuming excessive spending habits.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraph

US consumers have pulled back as never before.

“The current- account deficits of countries that have been under stress diminished over the last years considerably.”

Just two of 14 euro-zone government leaders have kept their posts in elections since late 2009 and extremists such as Golden Dawn in Greece are gaining support.

“The internal rebalancing in the euro area is progressing,” said Fels. “Some of them, especially Spain but also Portugal not to speak of Ireland, are regaining competitiveness.”

Internet companies like Amazon.com, Facebook and Google stay largely out of reach of tax collectors in large European countries like Britain, France and Germany by routing their sales through smaller countries, like Ireland and Luxembourg, where corporate tax rates are lower. The companies insist that such practices are permitted under European Union law and international taxation treaties.

That is a sign that E.C.B. measures have not yet succeeded in restoring the flow of credit to troubled countries like Spain.

But the E.C.B.’s efforts have been thwarted by continued reluctance by banks, many of which are already burdened by bad loans and are trying to reduce risk. In some countries there may also be a lack of demand for loans, because corporate managers are not confident enough to resume investing in their businesses.

The Federal Reserve is well into its third round of “quantitative easing,” in which it buys longer-term assets to bring down long-term lending rates.

In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.

In March, a smaller percentage of working-age people were actually working than at any other time since 1979.

The strategic technologies that have repeatedly transformed the market economy – from railroads to the Internet – required the construction of networks whose value in use could not be known when they were first deployed.

Consequently, innovation at the frontier depends on funding sources that are decoupled from concern for economic value;

Financial speculation has been, and remains, one required source of funding. Financial bubbles emerge wherever liquid asset markets exist. Indeed, the objects of such speculation astound the imagination: tulip bulbs, gold and silver mines, real estate, the debt of new nations, corporate securities.

In the second narrative, the world’s largest banks remain too big to manage and have strong incentives to engage in precisely the kind of excessive risk-taking that can bring down economies. Last year’s “London Whale” trading losses at JPMorgan Chase are a case in point. And, according to this narrative’s advocates, almost all big banks display symptoms of chronic mismanagement.

I had the opportunity to talk with senior officials and their advisers from various countries, including from Europe. I asked all of them the same question: When will we have a binding framework for cross-border resolution?CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe answers typically ranged from “not in our lifetimes” to “never.” Again, the reason is simple: countries do not want to compromise their sovereignty or tie their hands in any way.

Galileo — first proposed in 1994, more than 20 years after America started its own system, and initially promoted as a big potential moneymaker — “can’t give a direct return on investment, but politically it is very important for Europe to have its own autonomous system,” said Mr. Magliozzi of Telespazio.

It is also designed to be far more precise than the American version.

Galileo has been financed almost entirely by the European Union since 2007. It is the first and so far only major infrastructure project managed by the European Commission.

But euro-zone members would probably have to take a big hit on loans to the country and banks could face heavy losses on their exposure to the Greek economy.

Contingency planning is ramping up on the corporate side, too. One European supermarket group has been looking closely at its suppliers’ financing requirements. “The key thing for them is how their working capital cycle is funded and whether they can get access to the banks that they normally would use, which may themselves be in a liquidity squeeze,” a treasury official at the company tells CFO European Briefing. “Our job is to ensure the channels of liquidity are open. If we can keep that going, a lot of the disruption can be minimized relatively quickly.”

Meanwhile, some portfolio managers are dumping debt of southern European countries, while others are piling into U.S. and German issues,

Lenders in Germany, France and the U.K. had $1.19 trillion of claims on those four nations at the end of 2011, Bank for International Settlements data show.

Lenders in Germany and France saw an increase in deposits of 217.4 billion euros, or 6.3 percent, in the same period.

To prevent contagion, countries in the euro area would have to form a full-fledged political and fiscal union immediately and implement uniform guarantees on bank deposits throughout the region, Thomas Wacker and Juerg de Spindler, economists at Zurich-based UBS, said in a separate note. They said such a response can be ruled out.

In New York and London, banks have set up dedicated crisis teams, and rehearsed elaborate responses.

Citigroup has $84 billion in loans, bonds and other types of exposure to troubled European countries, plus France. The bank’s filings indicate that all but $8 billion of that exposure is offset with collateral it has collected and hedges on the portfolio.

Some banks are testing their systems to deal with the possibility of new currencies and preparing guidance for clients on how to operate in such an environment.