Taking on the launderers

As a companion piece to your recent jocular guidance for kleptocrats on “How to keep your ill-gotten loot” (October 12th), you could offer governments advice on how to expose the schemes used by the dishonest to hide their illicit funds. Here are a few suggestions. First, end anonymous shell companies by creating public registers of who actually controls corporations. Even the Cayman Islands has committed itself to implementing such a register. Second, make global anti-money-laundering oversight more transparent. Multilateral enforcement is often spoiled by international horse-trading over sanctions behind closed doors.

Third, keep a closer eye on the intermediaries. Your accompanying article (“Catch me if you can”) mentions that traders in luxury goods such as yachts are failing to flag suspicious transactions, even when they are obliged to do so. Such businesses, as well as bankers, estate agents, accountants and lawyers should all be held responsible for their role in facilitating money-laundering.

If the nerves of “pilfering potentates and their progeny” are really to be rattled, governments must close the loopholes which continue to make their countries a haven for illicit wealth.

PATRICIA MOREIRA

Managing director

Transparency International

Berlin

Whether intermediaries—lawyers, accountants, estate agents—are either passively complicit in or actively supporting money-laundering they are rightly denoted as enablers. Estate agents in particular have weak systems of due diligence and rarely file reports of suspicious transactions. They are almost never punished. Britain has imposed only three recorded sentences on intermediaries under the Proceeds of Crime Act between 2002 and 2018. It is far more common that no action is taken or, in precious few cases, a nominal fine is issued by a tribunal.

By increasing the resources of the state used to crack down on enablers, the ability of kleptocrats to access the global spoils of their grand corruption will be severely reduced.

JOHN HEATHERSHAW

Professor of international relations

University of Exeter

Curing hepatitis is a priority

The Global Fund’s progress on HIV , tuberculosis and malaria is great (“Building tomorrow”, October 12th). However, the World Health Organisation estimates that each year deaths from viral hepatitis (types B and C) are greater than HIV and more than double that from malaria. This is all the more striking when one considers there is a vaccine for hepatitis B and a highly effective short course cure for hepatitis C. Yet hepatitis is largely off the radar of global health programmes.

BRIGG REILLEY

Portland, Oregon

Economic discipline

The world economy’s new rules are not so “strange” (Special report, October 12th). You advised monetary policy to target three things: a long-run, instead of short-term, inflation rate; nominal GDP , as opposed to inflation or unemployment; and fiscal reforms, emphasising automatic stabilisers. Milton Friedman would have endorsed those first two targets. I followed them when I designed country programmes at the IMF in the 1990s. You could have been braver in recognising that economists do not understand well the nature of economic growth, or sustainable economic growth.

Strengthening “automatic stabilisers” (such as unemployment benefits) is not enough. The structure of tax and government spending must be improved to affect market behaviour and raise efficiency and investment.

Economic programmes face difficulties in drawing up fiscal and other structural reforms, particularly at the micro or retail level. This year’s Nobel prize in economics has highlighted the use of field experiments to find out how we can engineer behaviour to sustain higher economic growth. Such research would improve policy by moving from nominal to real GDP growth targeting.

GOPAL YADAV

Alexandria, Virginia

Your suggestion that a central bank should transfer “an equal amount to the bank account of every adult citizen” when the economy slumps, and that this would not involve redistribution, sounds odd (“The world economy’s strange new rules”, October 12th). Aside from its other problems (such as people with more than one account, or joint accounts) the fact that many poorer people do not have a bank account means that the relatively affluent would gain. This is a redistribution by any reasonable definition.

NEIL GARSTON

Emeritus professor of economics

California State University,

Los Angeles

Why Scotland should remain

Regarding the push for another vote on whether Scotland should leave the United Kingdom (“The other referendum”, October 19th), the Scottish National Party has played its Brexit cards cannily, but it must not underestimate the common sense of most Scots, or the fatigue following divisive referendums in 2014 and 2016. In recent polling by Survation, commissioned by Scotland in Union, only 27% of Scottish people supported the SNP ’s plan for another referendum before May 2021. A majority thought another referendum would make Scottish society more divided.

When asked whether Scotland should “remain” in the UK or “leave” (rather than a yes/no formulation, which the Electoral Commission dismissed for the UK -wide Brexit referendum in 2016), 59% said Scotland should remain. This is a long way from the overwhelming majority for separation which Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP ’s leader and first minister of Scotland, would like before calling for another vote.

If Brexit will harm the Scottish economy, Scexit would be worse. The Scottish government’s statistics show that 60% of Scottish trade goes to the rest of the UK ; that Scottish public spending is boosted by £1,968 ($2,530) per person via Westminster’s Barnett formula; and that Scotland’s deficit is over twice as high as the 3% level which would be required if an independent Scotland were to try to join the European Union.

ALASTAIR CAMERON

Director

Scotland in Union

Glasgow

The chorus line

“Don’t stop me now” (October 5th) reported on how the algorithms behind music streaming spur songwriters to get to the chorus in the first 15 seconds. That brought back some wonderful memories of how songs used to be crafted. You mentioned the two-minute opening before Bono starts singing on U2’s “Where the streets have no name”. A decade before that the title track on “Bat Out of Hell”, Meatloaf’s masterpiece, romps around for three minutes before we hear the chorus, which itself lasts 40 seconds. This is typical for a seven-track album, which has sold 43m copies and counting.

All the way back in 1972 Jethro Tull hit number one in America with “Thick As a Brick,” a song that admirably arrives at the refrain within the first minute, but does not return to it until 42 minutes later at the song’s close. Today’s music fans are too impatient.