Citing the Panama Papers, Elizabeth Warren proposes sweeping anti-financial-secrecy rules

The whistleblowers who brought us The Paradise Papers and The Panama Papers risked their freedom and even their lives (Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated for reporting on the stories). Years later, financial secrecy havens are still on the rise, and it's easy to think that all that blood and treasure thrown at ending money laundering and corruption was wasted.

But real change is accretive. The shifts in public opinion engendered by the big financial leaks were important, but not enough...Not yet. Still, as new stories about oligarchs and kleptocrats working with enablers in "civilized countries" to spirit out their cash, and that cash going to work to render our cities unlivable by transforming housing stock into "safe deposit boxes in the sky," or to undermine our democracies by creating vast dark-money pools used to influence elections and politics, the big leaks keep gaining salience in the public imagination, becoming more important over time (not less).

Elizabeth Warren has just introduced "a plan to fight global financial corruption" that is characteristically comprehensive it its scope:

* Require disclosure of beneficial owners of assets, piercing shell companies to get at the natural humans who benefit from them.

* Collect data on cross-border financial flows by mandating fine-grained reporting by financial institutions.

* Stiffen anti-bribery law, which currently punishes US companies that offer bribes, by banning US financial institutions from handling, accepting, or passing on funds derived from bribery, whether or not the briber or the bribee have a US nexus. Read the rest