Tax evasion and white-collar criminals.

Political analysis on the new structure for tax evasion and other financial mechanisms.

"Banking secrecy will no longer have a place". With these words German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble declared on October 27, 2014, in front of four European daily newspapers ("Les Echos", "El País", "The Times" and "Corriere della Sera") the international willingness to tackle the tax evasionl.

His remarks come in the context of a global agreement on the the global agreement on the automatic exchange of tax of tax information, which took place last Wednesday, October 29, in Berlin. The aim of this agreement will be to solve, by 2017, tax evasion to tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Switzerland or Liechtenstein. Although it is considered an important step to curb corruption, and we do not doubt it, it is nothing more than a façade covering other structures to carry out tax evasion.

In this article we will attempt to outline what represents a common practice in times of crisisThe financial capitalism of the world: a regulation that serves as a social pretext towards a growing deregulation of these illicit activities.

Financial capitalism

Financial capitalism becomes globalization. "Globalization is, in fact, driven by the profit of banks, speculators and traffickers of multinational (American) firms and under the multiform domination of the hyper-power of the United States."[1]. The type of capitalism that is being imposed, especially that which appeared after the Cold War, is a globalized, deregulated and deregulated globalized, deregulated and excessively "financialized" model.excessively "financialized". Of these three characteristics, the last is the most salient. Financialization" represents a "process by which financial services, firmly established, take over the dominant role in economic, cultural and political matters within a national [2] and world economy".l". For finance to establish itself as such, it requires the opening of certain frontiers (globalization).globalization) and the deregulation (or in other words liberalization) of the economy of the states. This is accompanied by the development of new communication technologies (such as the Internet) and large multinational companies.

The financial capitalism works on multiple levels, but it is on the supranational - or global - scale that it is most likely to progress, since financial capital escapes state control and is therefore free to roam free. Since the State should be the regulator of the economy (with the ideological foundations of the nation-state still in place), the State should be the regulator of the economy. nation-state), capital should be framed within it, assuming its laws and regulations. The search for extreme profitability on a global scale, at levels far removed from social reality, can cause imbalances given the "de-territorialization" of the economy, and cause periods of economic crisis.

The economic crisis of 2008: Context for reforming the criminal foundations of financial capitalism

It is commonly understood that the current economic crisis began in 2008 with the collapse of the American bank Lehman Brothers. But such blaming of the aforementioned bank masks a deeper, more structural reality, the responsibility for which has gone unnoticed in many households. We refer to the criminal reality of the speculative practices of banks, especially the excess of credit (taking large risks) and the covert sale of toxic financial products. This reality appeals to the white-collar criminals at the Heart of the movements of high finance.

These financial "scams" occur in times of economic euphoria, when the control of the economy is overshadowed by the optimism of the markets. When the "speculative bubble" bursts - due to the inability of certain economic sectors or society to repay the debt - the bad practices of the banks are exposed, as we saw with the case of Bankia in Spain. In reality, what happens is a collapse in the productive structure. The large number of competitors in the financial sector leads to a progressive decrease in the profit rate of the financial monopolies and forces them to change their strategy in order to perpetuate their monopolistic/oligopolistic dominance. monopolistic/oligopolistic. The financial monopolies/oligopolies then move to restructure the productive system legitimized by social urgency.

It is there where an attempt is made to regulate those "defects" of capitalismin order to avoid further relapses of the system and political and social turmoil. The evasion of capital in tax havens would be one of the major problems. In Spain, just entering the economic crisis (2009), large companies evaded 42,710 million euros[3] (let's remember the 22,000 Million € injected in Bankia by the State). However, parallel to the regulation of these structural defects, another monopolistic model of global swindling is being engendered.

High-frequency trading, a new criminal structure?

The agreement on the exchange of tax information, instigated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) [4] and signed by 49 countries[4] and signed by 49 countries in Berlin on October 29, 2014, aims to bring confidence in society and in the markets. It seems that, at least from the outset, this is good news.

But this new regulation is nothing more than a new mask for the criminal character of capitalism. In other words, the construction of new structural bases of the productive system that will serve to perpetuate the power of the monopolies/oligopolies. monopolies/oligopolies in the production of new mechanisms of capital evasion.

High frequency trading (is a trading technique that uses sophisticated computers capable of executing orders at high speed in order to take advantage of and profit from automatic trading when they find differences between prices on securities[5]. It is a form of trading algorithmic trading that acts on a time scale far superior to the human one. Thus, the human brain is replaced by algorithmic calculations and supercomputers, making the human increasingly dispensable.

We are facing a new technological paradigmbased on artificial intelligence, which is nothing more than a new financial engineering structure that favors a few people who own large amounts of capital. The regulation of tax havensas we have been saying, will be nothing more than a make-up service for tax fraud. tax fraud if these new speculative practices are not regulated. The autonomous capacity of these large computers, the possibility of obtaining ultra-fast profits and even of evading capital (since it is impossible to keep up with the speed of these mechanisms) contrasts with the global political turn against fraud.

The tax evasiontax evasion, the economic crises, corruption... represent a hidden face of the reality of crime. The media focus on highlighting the most visible acts but not those with more social repercussions. Rodrigo Rato is an example of the impunity of white-collar criminals whose actions have a higher impact on society.