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Officials say "countless investigations" end with the outlaws disappearing down these perfectly legal rabbit holes - and it's a growing frustration. All criminals need to launder their illicit earnings, and our lax incorporation requirements make the U.S. a highly attractive domicile. Only two states, Alabama and Alaska, bother to ask the names of the real owners. After incorporation, these anonymous companies can open U.S. bank or brokerage accounts, or obtain credit cards, all of which lend some U.S. legitimacy - the better to evade scrutiny or entrap more victims. In fact, the U.S. just might be the world's biggest washing...
...automakers tote up their January sales and release the numbers to the public this week, Wall Street analysts will be scrutinizing them more closely than usual with one end in mind: quantifying how badly Toyota has been hurt by its massive accelerator recall and identifying exactly which automakers are the most likely beneficiaries...
...reducing the U.S. budget shortfall from its current level to a still hefty annual average of 3.6% if everything goes well. The deficit amounts may be less dizzying in Europe, but they're still a major cause of concern for fiscal purists who fear that some governments may end up drowning in red ink. Twenty of the European Union's 27 members are running deficits to ease their way through the global recession, with the average pegged at 7.5% this year. Three years ago, the E.U.'s deficit average was just 0.8% of the bloc's total GDP. That figure...
...ugly? Greece is already scrambling to lower its deficit of nearly 13% to the E.U. ceiling of 3% by the end of 2012 under a European Commission plan to be endorsed on Wednesday. Spain is similarly promising to slash its deficit of 11.4% to just 3% by 2013, although the country - which is still reeling from the recession, with unemployment of nearly 19% - has been vague about how it will do that beyond proposing $69 billion in cost-cutting measures over the next four years. Last month, French officials somehow managed to sound proud when they announced that France...
Meanwhile, international negotiations will continue this year, culminating again in the annual U.N. climate summit at year's end, to be held in Cancún, Mexico, in November. (At the very least, if thousands of attendees are forced to wait in line outside for hours, as they were in Copenhagen, they'll get a nice tan.) Further complicating any attempt at progress is the growing sense that the U.N. process itself needs to be overhauled, especially after a handful of obstructionist countries managed to slow the Copenhagen negotiations to a crawl...