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President François Hollande on Wednesday announced the creation of a position of special prosecutor to pursue cases of corruption and tax fraud, and vowed to eradicate tax havens “in Europe and the world.”

one of those tax havens, Luxembourg, announced that it would bow to pressure from its European allies and begin forwarding the details of its foreign clients’ accounts to their home governments. Luxembourg, with only half a million people and a banking sector more than 20 times the size of its gross domestic product, is one of Europe’s largest financial centers and has been compared to Cyprus

Luxembourg’s announcement came a day after five of the biggest European countries — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — agreed to exchange banking data and create their own automatic tax data exchange. That mechanism would be modeled on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, passed by Congress in 2010 to track the overseas assets of Americans who might be dodging taxes.

Wealthy individuals may have been hiding as much as $32 trillion offshore at the end of 2010, according to Tax Justice Network, a U.K.-based organization that campaigns for transparency in the financial system. The estimate is almost three times the organization’s last estimate of $11.5 trillion in 2005. Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets, according to the research, carried out by former McKinsey & Co. economist James Henry. There is a "huge black hole in the world economy" of untaxed private wealth, Henry said in a statement. "The lost tax revenue implied by our estimates is huge."

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure," says John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. "Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people. This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich." ... In many cases, the total worth of these assets far exceeds the value of the overseas debts of the countries they came from.

We increasingly live in two worlds: the one where 99.9 percent of us live, and a separate, transnational society of the super-wealthy. One of whom we may elect to the presidency of the United States with the avowed intent of making those extremely wealthy people even wealthier.

Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.

The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P. To give you some perspective, this is as if a U.S. president’s cronies had managed to hide $20 trillion in overseas accounts.

, “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC says it's ceasing exploration in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.

an exploratory well drilled to 6,800 feet found oil and gas but not in sufficient quantities.

Shell drilled in 150 feet of water about 80 miles off Alaska's northwest coast.

How to get serious with North Korea

(CNN)North Korea's nuclear test last week follows a well-worn pattern that spans over a quarter century: Resort to periodic provocations, wait out the flurry of condemnations

All the while as Pyongyang advances its nuclear and missile technolog

what has also broken out of the vaults of offshore legal specialists Mossack Fonseca is one over-riding sense. The sense that normal rules do not apply to the global elite. In a new gilded age, taxes would – once again – appear to be for the little people.

the understanding of what had gone wrong in the first place has steadily shifted. Initially, there was almost no understanding at all: baffling news reports about credit default swaps suggested only sorcery going wrong. Slowly but surely, however, the world has learned that the banks that busted the global economy were also consumed with old-fashioned skulduggery: rigging rates, ripping off customers, and laundering Mexican drug money. Courtesy of the Lux tax leaks on sweetheart corporate deals, and the HSBC files, documenting Swiss lockers stacked with bricks of cash, the world learned much more, too, about the tax-dodging lengths that private wealth will go to in order to keep public coffers empty.

The people, then, will be sceptical about how the elite responds to the revelations. The UK government will, rightly, be expected to translate some impressive rhetoric on avoidance into reality. Declarations of resolve must now come backed with resources, unlike the recent Channel Island campaign which the HMRC has scaled back because of a lack of resources. Mr Cameron’s 2013 promise of openness must now be imposed on British tax havens, on pain of withdrawing dependency status. The register of beneficial ownership is welcome, but must come coupled with a serious checking mechanism, which – for the moment – is lacking.

Trump administration told Florida’s governor it won’t consider new oil and gas drilling off the state’s coast, backtracking on plans to expand offshore drilling

Oil companies consider the waters off the state the most logical and prized options for new drilling, while the tourism industry has been Florida’s priority for decades.

A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.

Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.

“Of course it could happen again, and I think one of the things of most concern is that our ability to control a spill is pretty much the same as it was 10 years prior,” Beinecke said.

The reality is more complicated, experts in the law, policy and economics of energy said. The orders are not likely to lead either to significant new energy development or to job creation in the near future. With oil prices around $50 a barrel and production already glutting world markets, few oil companies are making plans to expand into costlier, riskier offshore drilling.

“You don’t create jobs by signing a piece of paper if those jobs rely on a combination of economics and technology that the president doesn’t control,”

But Mr. Trump’s supporters say that in recent years, presidents have overused and abused that authority. Mr. Obama designated about 553 million acres as national monuments, more than any other president.

that paper was a conceptual exercise. The new one uses real-world data — and suggests a more pessimistic future. The researchers said they were surprised to see very little employment increase in other occupations to offset the job losses in manufacturing. That increase could still happen, they said, but for now there are large numbers of people out of work, with no clear path forward — especially blue-collar men without college degrees.

“The conclusion is that even if overall employment and wages recover, there will be losers in the process, and it’s going to take a very long time for these communities to recover,” Mr. Acemoglu said.

“If you’ve worked in Detroit for 10 years, you don’t have the skills to go into health care,” he said. “The market economy is not going to create the jobs by itself for these workers who are bearing the brunt of the change.”

anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.

From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.

Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.

Although economists and policy makers may pooh-pooh such ideas, sociologists—including me—have long understood that the need to see and be seen is a fundamental driver of human affairs.

I have spent the past 15 years researching the offshore wealth of the super-rich. In my efforts to understand how oligarchs’ wealth was hidden from tax agencies, divorcing spouses, and disgruntled business partners, I have been astonished again and again at how many oligarchs cannot seem to live without the splashy public display of their wealth, even when it puts them at risk.

As social scientists have argued for more than a century, the evidence is overwhelming that, beyond a subsistence level, people will fight even harder for status than they do for money.

Energy experts said that Mr. Biden missed an opportunity to connect the war in Ukraine to the need to more swiftly sever an economic reliance on fossil fuels. “The president did not articulate the long-term opportunity for the U.S. to lead the world in breaking free of the geopolitical nightmare that is oil dependency,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser to the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

In exposing the enormous leverage that Russia has enjoyed with its energy exports, the Ukraine conflict is forcing European leaders to make some urgent choices: Should it build new fossil fuel infrastructure so that it can replace Russian fuel with liquefied natural gas from elsewhere, chiefly the United States? Or should it shift away from fossil fuels faster?

A draft of the report, reviewed by The New York Times, suggests that the new strategy will propose speeding up energy efficiency measures and renewable energy installations. It views imports of liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., from the United States and elsewhere as a short term measure to offset Russian piped gas.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”

Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged

Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players

To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?

Thirteen countries got more than 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy in 2011, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, and many are aiming still higher.

Could we? Should we?

“Some of the countries that have been targeting our system have offshore centers that are far less transparent than Switzerland,” Mr. Cuendet said. ‘’Just look at a place like Delaware.”