THE chief executive of Jersey Finance Ltd, Geoff Cook, has launched a blog to comment on developments in the financial services industry.
Mr Cook’s first online entry, which can be read on the Jersey Finance website, www.jerseyfinance.je, addresses an issue very much of the moment – criticism of and promises of action on supposed tax havens.
He writes that ‘tax haven now competes with bank as the pejorative label of choice deployed by politicians and journalists alike’. However, he argues that international finance centres – well-regulated or otherwise – had no appreciable role in causing the present economic crisis.
In making the argument he uses particularly striking language. He writes, for example, that ‘debt became the rocket fuel of Wall Street and the honey pot of Main Street’.
