Thread: Financial Privacy Today: The Last Loophole

Financial Privacy Today: The Last Loophole

Written by Gary North on February 29, 2012


You can get it. You just can’t get it at your bank.

How can you get it. At your ATM. It’s cheap. It’s fast. It’s untraceable once you make the withdrawal.

No other way.

Hide your money outside the country? Nonsense. That has not been possible for 35 years. I wrote about this in 1976, when I was on Ron Paul’s staff. Since then, it has gotten worse. FATCA is the nail in the coffin.

Banking privacy is dead. Completely, totally dead. Murdered, really. The US government is the assailant, and FATCA is the murder weapon.

What is FATCA?

In brief, FATCA has two key concepts. First, it requires an additional (and completely unnecessary) layer of reporting from all US taxpayers who have ‘foreign financial accounts’ at ‘foreign financial institutions.’ Though as we have discussed before, both of these critical terms are ridiculously and flagrantly ambiguous, putting the onus entirely on the taxpayer.

Without clarifying what constitutes foreign financial accounts and institutions, Congress has effectively created decades of debate in tax court… a move that will undoubtedly ruin the lives of the unfortunate folks who get dragged into the fight.

The second key issue is that FATCA puts a burden on ALL foreign financial institutions worldwide to enter into an information-sharing agreement with the IRS; this essentially obliges every bank on the planet to submit reports and customers’ private data to the IRS.

Banks who don’t enter into this information sharing agreement will have a 30% tax withheld on funds that originate from, or go through, the US banking system. Further, banks who enter into the information sharing agreement are obliged to withhold the 30% tax on transfers to other banks who do NOT enter into the agreement.

Foreign banks are entering into information-sharing agreements with their governments. Then the governments share this information with America’s IRS.

Currency is the way out. But you cannot withdraw much. It’s for small purchases. It’s for Craigslist deals.

The screws are tightening. They will never get loose until after the Great Default, when the U.S. government goes bankrupt.

Most Americans pay most of their taxes. They don’t have money except what remains after their employer withholds money to send to the IRS.

This new law is hurting Americans who have a lot of money and who want to send it outside the USA. Foreign banks are now refusing to open accounts for Americans.

We are moving toward tyranny. The good news is this: Washington will go bankrupt before we get to tyranny.



Financial Privacy Today: The Last Loophole