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.
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in title, tags, annotations or urlHow Apple and Other Corporations Move Profit to Avoid Taxes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“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.”
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it is especially hard for countries to monitor prices on intellectual property, like patents and copyrights.
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Africa losing billions from fraud and tax avoidance | Global development | The Guardian - 0 views
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Africa losing billions from fraud and tax avoidance
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Africa is losing more than $50bn (£33bn) every year in illicit financial outflows as governments and multinational companies engage in fraudulent schemes aimed at avoiding tax payments to some of the world’s poorest countries, impeding development projects and denying poor people access to crucial services.
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African Union’s (AU) high-level panel on illicit financial flows and the UN economic commission for Africa (Uneca).
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The Morning Ledger: Europe Prepares for Nightmare Scenario - The CFO Report - WSJ - 0 views
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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.
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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.”
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Meanwhile, some portfolio managers are dumping debt of southern European countries, while others are piling into U.S. and German issues,
Tourists Also Tell Greece No: Drop in Summer Bookings - WSJ.com - 0 views
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Greek-vacation bookings from Germany and the rest of Europe are down sharply, as would-be tourists take fright at the prospect of strikes and street protests.
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Early reservations for this summer's tourist season are down by around 15% from a year ago. Last year's record total of 16.4 million visitors is already out of reach, he says.
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The industry accounts for about one-sixth of economic activity and nearly one in five jobs.
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Ireland's Debt to Foreign Banks Is Still Unknown - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Mr. Weber, who is also a member of the European Central Bank’s governing council, said that the statistics reflected Ireland’s status as a financial center: much of what is recorded as claims on Ireland is in fact money funneled through Irish subsidiaries of German banks, and ultimately bound for elsewhere, Mr. Weber said. He said total German exposure was closer to $30 billion.
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In both cases more than half of the exposure was to Ireland’s private sector, rather than lending to the government or Ireland’s beleaguered banks.
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Taxpayers will bear the cost, but they may never find out how much. The bad bank, known as FMS Wertmanagement, has no plans to release financial statements, according to Soffin, the German government organization that oversees bank rescues.
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Leading German Economist Peter Bofinger: 'Germany Has a Vital Interest in Ensuring Irish Solvency' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - 0 views
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However, Irish companies and banks are very highly indebted to foreign banks -- three times more than the Greeks.
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According to Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, German banks are Ireland's biggest creditors, to the tune of €166 billion ($226 billion), and that includes hundreds of short-term loans to Irish banks. How dangerous is the Irish crisis for Germany?
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The situation is very dangerous. The German government has a vital interest in ensuring the solvency of the Irish state and its banks.
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Analysis: Euro zone fragmenting faster than EU can act - 0 views
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Deposit flight from Spanish banks has been gaining pace and it is not clear a euro zone agreement to lend Madrid up to 100 billion euros in rescue funds will reverse the flows if investors fear Spain may face a full sovereign bailout.
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Many banks are reorganising, or being forced to reorganise, along national lines, accentuating a deepening north-south divide within the currency bloc.
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Since government credit ratings and bond yields effectively set a floor for the borrowing costs of banks and businesses in their jurisdiction, the best-managed Spanish or Italian banks or companies have to pay far more for loans, if they can get them, than their worst-managed German or Dutch peers.
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Central Bank Sets Bond Plan Meant to Ease Euro Debt Peril - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The European Central Bank said Thursday it had agreed on a framework for buying the bonds of troubled euro-zone countries on the open market in unlimited quantities, but left the timing unclear.
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In essence, the bank left the next step to the beleaguered governments. They would be required to ask the E.C.B. formally to begin buying their bonds in the open market and would have to agree to follow detailed conditions for paying down their debt and hewing to fiscal discipline. It would be up to the E.C.B. to determine whether the terms of the agreement were acceptable, and whether the government was meeting those conditions over time.
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Greek Bank Withdrawals Accelerate - WSJ.com - 0 views
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"As we approach the last few days before the elections I expect deposit withdrawals to rise further," he added. "And I wouldn't be surprised if by Friday we saw outflows of €1 billion to €1.5 billion."
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Since the start of Greece's debt crisis in late 2009, Greece's banks have lost about one-third of their deposit base as nervous savers have taken their money out of the banks and either sent it abroad, or else stashed it away for safekeeping.
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In the past two years, deposit outflows have generally averaged between €2 billion and €3 billion a month, but have spiked during periods of political uncertainty.
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New Truths That Only One Can See - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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New Truths That Only One Can See
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Given the desire for ambitious scientists to break from the pack with a striking new finding, Dr. Ioannidis reasoned, many hypotheses already start with a high chance of being wrong
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Taking into account the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable.
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Tennessee Valley Authority to close 8 coal-fired power units - The Washington Post - 0 views
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The Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the nation’s five biggest users of coal for electricity generation, said Thursday it would close down eight coal-fired power units with 3,300 megawatts of capacity.
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Many of the plants were more than 50 years old, and under a consent decree between the TVA, four state governments and the Sierra Club, the authority was required to install additional pollution control equipment known as scrubbers or shut down the plants
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Johnson said that electricity demand has dropped nearly 10 percent over the past five years., half of that because one company, USEC, which produced and sold enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power plants, ceased its energy-intensive operations.
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A Disease Cuts Corn Yields - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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No one is certain why Goss’s wilt has become so rampant in recent years. But many plant pathologists suspect that the biggest factor is the hybrids chosen for genetic modification by major seed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. “My theory is that there were a couple of hybrids planted that were selected because they had extremely high yield potentials,” said Dr. Robertson, whose research is financed by Monsanto and the Agriculture Department. “They also may have been highly susceptible to Goss’s wilt.”
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About 90 percent of the corn grown in the United States comes from seeds that have been engineered in a laboratory, their DNA modified with genetic material not naturally found in corn species. Almost all American corn, for instance, is now engineered to resist the powerful herbicide glyphosate (often sold as Roundup), so farmers can kill weeds without killing their corn.
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As farmers grow more corn to satisfy the demand for ethanol, they are rotating it less frequently with other crops.
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Golden Rice - Lifesaver? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”
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And they have motivated similar attacks on trials of other genetically modified crops in recent years: grapes designed to fight off a deadly virus in France, wheat designed to have a lower glycemic index in Australia, sugar beets in Oregon designed to tolerate a herbicide, to name a few.
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Not owned by any company, Golden Rice is being developed by a nonprofit group called the International Rice Research Institute with the aim of providing a new source of vitamin A to people both in the Philippines, where most households get most of their calories from rice,
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These maps show how Asia is taking over the oil markets - 0 views
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he world is now using a record amount of oil even though Europe and the United States are paring back.
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And even as companies are finding new sources of crude in the deep ocean, tar sands and shale rock, they’re struggling to keep up and global crude prices are much, much higher than they were back in 1980.
Hello, Young Workers: One Way to Reach the Top Is to Start There - New York Times - 0 views
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is the mounting evidence produced by labor economists of just how important it is for current graduates to ignore the old-school advice of trying to get ahead by working one's way up the ladder. Instead, it seems, graduates should try to do exactly the thing the older generation bemoans — aim for the top.
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starting at the bottom is a recipe for being underpaid for a long time to come.
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A recent study, by the economists Philip Oreopoulos, Till Von Wachter and Andrew Heisz, "The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession" (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12159, April 2006. http://www.columbia.edu/~vw2112/papers/nber_draft_1.pdf), finds that the setback in earnings for college students who graduate in a recession stays with them for the next 10 years.
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At Anchor Off Lithuania, Its Own Energy Supply - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The price of natural gas in Lithuania was 15 percent higher than the European average last year, according to the European Commission. Only Bulgaria, where Gazprom has a near monopoly, paid more. Gazprom also has an ownership stake in Lithuania’s natural gas distribution network. Part of Lithuania’s electrical infrastructure is still controlled from Moscow, too, and it is not yet possible to connect the country to the European grid.
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Lithuania also does not use oil shale, which provides much of the electricity for Estonia, the third Baltic member of the European Union.
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Lithuania used to rely on nuclear power to supply most of its electricity. But as a condition of joining the union in 2004, the country agreed to shut down its Chernobyl-style nuclear power station at Ignalina.
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