Trial begins for the "cum/ex" bankers accused of stealing 447m and trying for 60b

You know that late-stage capitalism is upon us when a financial scandal targeting 60 billion in fraud against public treasuries is lost in the noise of other scandals.

The scandal is called "cum/ex" ("with/without"), and it used a blunt tactic to defraud tax authorities by allowing multiple parties to claim to own the same shares in order to apply for tax credits. The accused -- "cowboy traders, seasoned tax lawyers and mathematical whizz kids" -- based in London's ground zero for financial crime, the City, are said to have already stolen 447m when they were caught.

While the press accounts have been at pains to contextualize the breathtaking scale of the fraud ("Robbery of the century" - Le Monde; "Organised crime in pinstripe suits" -Follow the Money), those accounts have been sparse, drowned in the noise of a thousand other scandals.

Moreover, the scandal implicates many of Europe's largest banks (of course). As the trial begins, the primary defense the accused are mounting is that they were engaged in tax "optimization" and that it was all perfectly legal.

As John Quiggin writes, "crooked deals of this scale suffice for a complete explanation of the growth of the global financial sector since the 1970s. The point of the financial sector is not to allocate capital more efficiently, but to undermine the regulatory and tax systems that are supposed to make the economy work properly. Unsurprisingly the huge financial boom has been accompanied by miserable productivity growth, repeated business collapses and massive growth in inequality."

Wearing a navy blue suit and an Apple Watch with a white strap, Shields on Wednesday used a Powerpoint presentation to talk the court through the cum-ex ecosystem of labyrinthine trade chains he helped conceive and control, which prosecutors say cost the German state 450m.