US tech and pharma park cash offshore

FT analysis here.

28 replies on “US tech and pharma park cash offshore”

Explanation!

Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis

The Uncertain Future of Capitalism

by Ernesto Screpanti

In this provocative study, economist Ernesto Screpanti argues that imperialism—far from disappearing or mutating into a benign “globalization”—has in fact entered a new phase, which he terms “global imperialism.” This is a phase defined by multinational firms cut loose from the nation-state framework and free to chase profits over the entire surface of the globe. No longer dependent on nation-states for building a political consensus that accommodates capital accumulation, these firms seek to bend governments to their will and destroy barriers to the free movement of capital. And while military force continues to play an important role in imperial strategy, it is the discipline of the global market that keeps workers in check by pitting them against each other no matter what their national origin. This is a world in which the so-called “labor aristocracies” of the rich nations are demolished, the power of states to enforce checks on capital is sapped, and global firms are free to pursue their monomaniacal quest for profits unfettered by national allegiance.

Screpanti delves into the inner workings of global imperialism, explaining how it is different from past forms of imperialism, how the global distribution of wages is changing, and why multinational firms have strained to break free of national markets. He sees global imperialism as a developing process, one with no certain outcome. But one thing is clear: when economic crises become opportunities to discipline workers, and when economic policies are imposed through increasingly authoritarian measures, the vision of a democratic and humane world is what is ultimately at stake.

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4475/

Who do I phone in Global?

Explanation!!

The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (New Edition)

An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy

by John Bellamy Foster

In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital, a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, influenced generations of radical and heterodox economists. They recognized that Marx’s work was unfinished and itself historically conditioned, and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account. Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such firms accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales efforts, and other factors—could not be profitably invested back into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir Amin in particular.

John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the financialization of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-finance capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming the system itself.

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4413/

Hello – Systems of Finance & Corporate Power! Hello! anyone there? …

I have austerified my subscription to the FT. It now happily pays the property tax and hopefully is better spent. Ergo I cannot comment on the article.
However a related off-shore matter interests me. It is this;

Will the recently reported €560 million gain on BOI shares by Wilbur Ross, be subject to Irish Capital Gain Tax at 33%.? Just asking.

@DOD

Don’t go citing those marxicists ’round here. Why, didn’t I read in somebody’s comment here that all of their arguments are refuted in advance? Because Stalin.

@ Ernie Ball

Capitalism cannot guarantee consistent, smooth, never-ending and equitable growth, so the solution is to abolish private property, introduce a command economy and take (according to some yet-to-be-determined formula and mechanism) from each according to ‘his ability’ and give unto each according to ‘his needs’?

Unfortunately it wasn’t just Stalin who gave the practice of Marxist economics a bad name.

@Ninap

Any substantive critique on any aspect of the social scientific ‘analyses’ by Screpanti and Foster, in the Marxist ‘tradition’, in the first two comments above?

@all

Further update from TCD grad on emerging geopolitical economy of Middle East

‘The Lebanese Druze leader – who fought in a 15-year civil war that redrew the map of Lebanon – believes that the new battles for Sunni Muslim jihadi control of northern and eastern Syria and western Iraq have finally destroyed the post-World War Anglo-French conspiracy, hatched by Mark Sykes and François Picot, which divided up the old Ottoman Middle East into Arab statelets controlled by the West.’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/robert-fisk-the-old-partition-of-the-middle-east-is-dead-i-dread-to-think-what-will-follow-9536467.html

@EU

Good time to recognize Kurdistan – ignored for far too long since Sykes/Picot.

Gavin,

this is mainly a problem of you Anglo countries.

When German companies made a tiny little fuss about sanctions,

they had a nice, polite date with Mutti

and after that they toed the line and fully, openly, (without any reservations ……, they dared to utter in public : – )

embraced the prerogative of the government, as it represents

The Will of The People of Germany

@Prudent Hans

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture and austerity it imposes on others and how to turn it to its advantage.

(Blind Biddy on German leadership of the EZ financial crisis; with apologies to Freddie)

fyi

Poets wrote songs about it for generations. Guerrilla fighters holed up in the mountains trained for it for decades. But in the end, when a Kurdish army finally took control of Kirkuk, they realized the dream of their forefathers within hours, without having to fire a shot.

The collapse of Baghdad’s control of northern Iraq in the face of an onslaught by Sunni insurgents has allowed Kurds to take the historic capital they regard as their Jerusalem, and suddenly put them closer than ever to their immortal goal: an independent state of their own.

[…]

The 30 million Kurds – the world’s largest stateless nation, divided between Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey – have sought a state of their own since the mapmakers of the modern Middle East denied them one last century.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.598650

while watching England – Italien 1:1 just now

Seafoid,

find your own translation of words.

I was actually going to continue my first post with while anglo countries have difficulties to repulse the rule by corporations,

many roman countries have the opposite problem, believing that an almighty government can override the laws of physics, and what I would describe as the fundamental laws of economics, the hard rails and e.g. introduce funny laws like the Marxist Piketty.

Your youtube is not available here.

@seafoid

“If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” (Karl Marx)

Just thought I’d share this before Prudent Hans declares Karl Marx to be a Marxist – his/her usual response to engaging in substantive argumentation in a Habermasian sense!

@Prudent Hans

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.” (T. Adorno)

Wonder was Theodor a Marxist? And what did Heisenborg say to Bohr in Copenhagen? Were they both Marxists? Following Bohr, can one be a Physicist and a Marxist simultaneously? Do let us know.

Here is a link to Bennett Jones Spring 2014 Economic Outlook for Canada/
By David Dodge ex Governor Bank of Canada, Richard Dion economist, John Weekes political/business analyst.
David Dodge has been quite vocal on radio/TV about bank regulation Basel style which he describes as black letter regulation, rigid and detailed as opposed to principle based regulation which he maintains would be far better suited to most countries. The other idea he is hammering is that the real cost of money now is 1% and it is the best time in a century for governments to invest in infrastructure using 30 to 50 year bonds. He also emphasizes balanced operating budgets while slowing down debt repayment and investing cost benefit analysed infrastructure. The man has a proven track record, including doling out bitter medicine when required.

Implementing the Basel regulations will retard recovery in Europe is something he has discussed on business TV programs. He supports wider latitude for individual countries who know what is best for their own economies and not regulations written in stone coming from Basel, Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin. United we stand, divided we fall, but one size does not fit all.

@Mickey Hickey

If Hibernia ever decides to act intelligently & independently with a smidgin of foresight on behalf of the interests of its citizenry – such a time would be a good time to pragmatically get into Dodge!

Blind Biddy would take a 50yr Trillion bond @1% like a shot out of a bazooka! So would I!

Nite!

Here is a paper that argues for robustness and strength through fragmentation.
Unified China – Divided Europe
Chiu Yu Ko, Tuan Hwee Sng University of Singapore
Mark Koyama George Mason University

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2382346

Until massive tax avoidance became an international issue, raising the issue in Ireland risked being accused of “talking down the economy.”

Anyone who didn’t foresee that the likes of Google booking almost half its global revenues in Ireland without getting a reaction, is naive.

It appears that Apple Operations International only was dubbed stateless in 2006 when Apple discovered that it could keep its financials private.

It paid tax in Ireland in 2005. The Revenue knew that it stopped paying tax from 2006/07.

As I said in the past, it should not be a shock that when a company referred to the US and Ireland as their main tax jurisdictions in regulatory filings, the company was including Irish offshore entities and the world at large assumed that the low foreign tax rate was related to Ireland.

More on Apple, FDI and the FT report

http://bit.ly/1osK2NL

Parking Cash – from the global to the Local: A little classic from Eoghan in his ‘official’ capacity!:

‘Apart from the M.J. Molloy and John McGahern the only writer I really rate on the repressive rural Ireland of recent memory is Sean MacMathuna. His chilling short story, “A Straight Run Down to Kilcash” (1987) takes us down one of the dark roads that led to Tuam.

Dennis Stack, the son of a strong farmer, a student at a prestigious Munster Catholic college run by priests, makes a domestic servant at the school pregnant. She is packed off to England. Denis is merely rusticated for a few months.His father collects him from the school in a Land Rover. Far from being angry at Denis, he seems proud of his son’s sexual prowess. “Did you put her up the pole, Denisheen you whore?” Stopping for a pint, he probes his son for details, “What was she like, son?” I looked at my pint and at my father’s half-embarrassed face. “She had big tits,” I said. “Sure all scrubbers have big tits,” he said in matey confidence, clinching his wisdom with a wink.Back on the road to Kilcash, his father boasts of the financial success of the farm.

“Pound notes are springing out of every field of the three hundred and forty acres. And not one penny tax.” He adds that it was “amazing what a farmer married to a national school teacher could do because she didn’t pay income tax either”.

Boasting of how he bought a calf and ducks dirt cheap from cash-strapped sellers, he says: “If you have money you can do the divil himself.” And he urges his son to make an advantageous marriage match.”He told me Mary Kissane was going to do medicine. What he did not mention was that she had two hundred acres ‘bounding’ our land and wore glasses.” Then his father comes to the core question: ‘Would you think of Mary?'”I nodded my head in understanding. Tears came into his eyes. “If you do son, it’s a straight run for both of you down to Kilcash.” Kilcash was our graveyard and a straight run down to it was a local euphemism for a ‘happy life’.

[Eoghan Harris, DinnyOB SundayPress]

Harris introduces the piece above as follows:

‘LET me finish with a footnote to the Tuam tragedy. Too little attention has been paid to the role of the rural bourgeoisie. The late Kevin Danaher, doyen of Irish folklorists, used to remark that in post-famine Ireland it was not the priests but the strong farmers who set sexual standards.’

Money, sex, and power. And the Financial Elite at the IFSC, represented by a ‘strong farmer’, have taken tea more often than other interest group with the ‘national teacher’ – the local ‘master’.

U know, Kavanagh was roight – that ‘half a rood of rock’ …. methinks the upper-echelons are still on the ‘road to Kilcash’; spose he was also a marxist! Any correlations entirely unintended …..

@David O’D
You have an excellent grasp of rural realities.
A good friend of my father’s, an accountant by trade and a part time lecturer on the subject at a local college who also owned a bar gave me a two hour lecture one afternoon on the realities of the business/marriage arrangements then in vogue.
He was around fifty years of age and had recently married a local woman who had inherited a bar and 30 to 40 acres about 3/4 of a mile outside of town. I was the only customer in the bar and he knew me since I was 12 years old so I could be trusted. He told me that money and property had married and gave me a history of similar arrangements in the area over the past twenty five years or so. Prior to marrying for love and property he told me that matchmaking was the modus operandi and the families involved negotiated an exchange of cash, livestock and property. It appeared to me that progress had been made in that women were no longer being bartered like chattels at a relatively young age and were now making their own bargains in middle age.

Personally I followed my mother’s advice and went for brains. She explained to me that brains still functioned long after looks faded and property was lost. I did not do this consciously but I am well aware we are all products of our environment. The underlying message was don’t show up here with a big bosomed smiling floozy , you will marry a fine, capable and serious woman like myself. Unsaid was I didn’t wear my fingers to the bone all these years for you to turn around and disappoint me.

Rural Ireland is one tough and rigid environment.

On the 110th anniversary of Bloomsday it is appropriate to quote a note Joyce wrote to one of his publishers.

“It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having a good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

Over 100 years later we are still working on it.

@Mickey Hickey

The toughest institution in rural Ireland was, and is, the Irish Family. V. well captured also in J.B. Keane’s ‘Field’ and brilliantly acted by Richard Harris, a city boy from Limerick. The competition amongst sons and the disposal of daughters etc …..

In 100th anniversary of Dubliners U might enjoy this:

Anthony Burgess on James Joyce: the lost introduction

Written in 1986 as the introduction to a Dolmen Press edition of ‘Dubliners’ illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, but never used, this brilliant essay, recently found among the papers of the author, who died in 1993, appears here for the first time But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams,
For I can do those things for them
Through which I lost my diadem,
Those things for which Grandmother Church
Left me severely in the lurch.
Thus I relieve their timid arses,
Perform my office of Katharsis. [the student Joyce ]

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/anthony-burgess-on-james-joyce-the-lost-introduction-1.1828423

p.s. The Mammy is wise …

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