Anti #FATCA BRIC nations building political clout and alliance

 

We all spend tons of time wondering what individual effort might bring down FATCA. Will the Congress come to its senses and pass the Meadows/Rand bills to repeal FATCA? Will Nigel Green & Jim Jatras achieve a lobbying miracle? Could it be possible that the Appellate Court will come up with a different finding than Judge Rose in the “Bopp” case? Or will the Canadians be successful in striking down their IGA with other countries deciding they will do the same? Will the Treasury Secretary indicate that #AmericansAbroad are exempt from FATCA? Or somehow Treasury changes its mind and allows for Same Country Exception?

To the best of my recollection, when the post below was published NONE of the actions mentioned above had started. If somebody had predicted any of them (never mind all of them), I expect we would have thought they were nuts. It has seemed so overwhelming and so hopeless from the start. Yet we fought back from the very beginning, starting simply at first; researching information and making decisions on our own terms, being unwilling to just follow blindly what we were told by the IRS, the compliance community and so on. Little by little groups began planning how to approach their ideas of taking the battle to the next level. Everyone should be proud that so much has been done under such dire circumstances, the expat grassroots movement is alive & well!

Of course, there are always other currents flowing alongside all that is happening and usually the best results are the ones that are not planned per sé but come about as the interplay of all the factors as they work themselves out. Clearly, one of the most powerful would be the demise of the U.S. as the world’s biggest bully, police officer and holder of the most powerful reserve currency. Of course many Western business/financial leaders dismiss this idea as pure folly. “Impossible“ they say. However, look at the bank collapses of 2008. Would financial officers not have reacted the same, “Impossible” ?

Did we not react the same when we first started out? Impossible ?

There is reason to believe the BRICS nations might well succeed at creating a system that can bypass what the U.S. currently “owns”; the USD as the world standard reserve currency.

This will be the first of a few posts regarding BRICS. We truly may be witnessing the fall of the American Empire and the rise of a new ruling entity.

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Originally posted on the RenounceUSCitizenship blog March 24, 2013

 

Earlier this year I wrote that “Peaceful resistance to FATCA will result in a new financial order“. An article by Geoffrey York of the Globe and Mail suggests this may be starting to happen.

The article is well worth reading.  Note the following commentary and excerpts:

For a glimpse of a potential new world order, take a look at the carefully chosen plans for the first overseas trip by China’s new President.

Fresh from his triumph in China’s leadership transition this month, Xi Jinping won’t be paying his respects in Washington or Europe on his debut foreign tour. Instead, on Friday, he flies to Russia – and then onward to three resource-rich African countries, in a trip laden with symbolic and political meaning.

What? He is not starting in Washington or Brussels? What is he up to? What could this mean?

Originally an economic bloc, BRICS – now comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is venturing further into politics and security. The summit will feature an unexpectedly heavy agenda of global issues, from the Syrian war to the planned creation of a development bank to compete with the World Bank, with $50-billion in seed money.

Did you catch that? A group of nations, of which at least three are hostile to FATCA are meeting to create a bank to compete with the World Bank? But, this really could not be of any significance. These countries are of little substance (or so the U.S. might think), but the article goes on to note:

While it claims to have no political ambitions, BRICS is already a powerful economic bloc. Its leaders boast that it represents 45 per cent of the world’s population, 30 per cent of the world’s territory, 30 per cent of global output and 17 per cent of world trade. And despite a recent slowdown, it has been responsible for 50 per cent of global economic growth over the past decade, making it a key source of hope for Africa, where the BRICS nations have dramatically increased their trade and investment in recent years.

Fascinating. Could this possibly be the beginning of a “FATCA Free Zone?” On this note consider the following excerpt from a comment by Todundsteur:

The greatest threat to the effectiveness of both Charlie’s FATCAT and Carl’s STHA is the very real possibility that they will trigger a reaction that attempts nothing less than the establishment of an alternative world financial system parallel to that based on the Tokyo-NY-London-Frankfurt axis.

Johannesburg, Dubai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Singapore, Sao Paolo, Shanghai suggest themselves.

One highly-regulated, highly taxed, safe but stagnant and the other looser, lightly taxed, risky but freewheeling and dynamic.

We shall see.

Meanwhile back in the world of the West, we are still waiting to see whether Cyprus will (in the end) confiscate the savings of it bank depositors to pay for its debt problem. First, Cyprus is “Cyprused” – then the rest of the world. Funny, the U.S. owes China a lot of money. Will the debtor be able to impose FATCA on the creditor?

This may be the best news those opposing FATCA have had yet!