Three news to start your week: April 03
U.K. Plans to Invest $495 Million in Economic Crime Crackdown
(Wall Street Journal)
As part of a new plan to crack down on economic crime, the U.K. government said it would hire 475 financial crime detectives and change laws about corporate corruption.
The new investigators will work to stop money laundering and the illegal use of cryptocurrencies and recover more assets. Several agencies will also work together to form a group to search for and seize illicit coins.
The three-year plan calls for several government departments to spend an extra $495 million; half will come from the government, and a half from a tax on the private sector. In addition, the government will spend £100 million on data processing and other technology to help law enforcement.
Federal Regulators blamed executives at Silicon Valley Bank for its failure
(The New York Times)
Michael S. Barr, the Federal Reserve's vice chair for supervision, appeared last week before the Senate Banking Committee, where he blamed Silicon Valley Bank's executives for its collapse. Moreover, he gave little explanation for why supervisors had failed to stop its demise, saying that the central bank was examining what went wrong.
“Fundamentally, the bank failed because its management failed to appropriately address clear interest rate risk and clear liquidity risk,” Barr said. “The Federal Reserve Bank brought forward these problems to the bank, and they failed to address them in a timely way — that exposure led the firm to be highly vulnerable to a shock.”
US makes corporate transparency commitment with 20 nations
(AP News)
The United States and more than 20 other countries committed to making corporations more open. The Biden administration is setting up a new database on small ownership, and the Department of the Treasury will be in charge.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at the Summit for Democracy that "the beneficial ownership database will deter dirty money from entering the U.S."
The registry will have personal information about the owners of at least 32 million U.S. companies, and some of the countries in the commitment are Colombia, Malta and Japan.
