When US President Trump announced he thought that the USA had been pushed around in relation to financial regulation, that was fake news generated by paranoid delusion or total ignorance. But now he's made a similar stupid decision raising the question whether it's personality more than capability that's leading him to paint the USA as a victim.
A Sri Lankan man, legally in Australia, released from a psychiatric hospital yesterday morning was under arrest within hours for making threats aboard a Malaysia Airlines aircraft that had just left Melbourne. The aircraft turned back after passengers overpowered him. Australian police are in wonder at the bravery of the passengers and their resilience at the disruption of their travel.
Australia has long been a dangerous environment in the housing market. It was, in relative terms, barely affected by the global financial crisis and rampant inflation has been ignored by national and state governments, both of which have significant influence over the market. It's a bizarre market: the signs of imminent collapse are ignored and prices continue to rise, causing excessive borrowing and thousands of families trapped in rentals because they cannot afford to buy. New South Wales has today announced significant changes to the taxes under its control to try to fix some of the causes of under-supply. But interest rates, the most important weapon, are in federal hands.
The defendant, an Uzbek national in the USA, was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for conspiring and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and possessing an unregistered destructive device.
Quietly, almost under the counter, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority is preparing itself for life outside the EU with a raft of agreements directly negotiated with regulators around the world.
AVIVA is a conglomerate of dozens of insurance companies, and can trace its lineage back to the 15th Century. So there's not a lot it hasn't seen but the levels of fraudulent claims, up about 10% in the past year, is truly novel as organised crime gangs turn to insurance fraud as a money generator and opportunists try their luck. As lawyers and various social groups argue that the reforms in the justice system to help reduce the attractiveness of such offences are badly thought out, AVIVA says "whiplash fraud remains our biggest concern."
Nigel Morris-Cotterill suggests that banks and others who terminate e.g. correspondent banking relationships and customers' accounts saying it's because of de-risking might have another option: mentor them to get it right.
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Nigel Morris-Cotterill is one of the world's most experienced counter-money laundering strategists. www.countermoneylaundering.com.
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We all know motor racing is dangerous, be it F1, MotoGP, Indycar, Aussie V8s or any of a host of lesser series. But safety developments have been such that most drivers and riders walk away from the most devastating crashes. Here are some that have been spared serious injury, never mind death, by those improvements, many of which began with the work of Prof Sid Watkins, Ayrton Senna and Sir Jackie Stewart.
Every so often, Bitcoin hits the news because a criminal gang is using it for some nefarious purpose. We examined BitCoin in a special issue (see here) in 2013. It was not our first look at virtual currencies: that was way back in the mid 1990s, before we even launched World Money Laundering Report, and we've kept a watching brief ever since. Here's the current scary stuff.
Malaysia's National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency has banned sales of several products produced by "Dr Vida," who has become wealthy selling, amongst other things, Qu Gebu AP Krim.
If you are a fan of motor racing, don't bother with yesterday's Monaco Grand Prix. An utterly dull procession for almost the entire event was punctuated only by odd-ball happenings and intrigue. If you are a conspiracy theorist and find humour in the oddest places, there might be something for you. But first, this telephone call from Fernando Alonso waiting to drive in the Indy 500 to Button, in the car on the way down the pit lane to his own, personal, lonely, starting line.
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