Interesting article on dirty money, http://bit.ly/1CAEsub, accessed Oct. 18, 2014, as these alleged wrongful artifices present a recurring pattern and demonstrate weaknesses in the financial reporting structure available in the public domain. In brief, discovery of the individual beneficiaries is concealed through shell | front companies. Only through deep (i.e., penetrating the recorded | reported but false business purpose) and comprehensive (i.e., tracking across numerous jurisdictions) analyses will the financial forensics expert determine the economic reality of transactions. The requisite surveillance authority is not generally available to public domain inquirers. Among many problems resulting from these schemes of secrecy is the devaluation of public domain information (e.g., if you read about it today, then it’s too late to do anything about it tomorrow).
Organizations in the private and public sectors have developed expertise in the field of enhanced due diligence, though the verifiability | falsifiability of the proprietary purchased content is not transparent. The monetary value of this content results from the bona fides and reputations of these professional data analysts and storytellers; i.e., individual and institutional prestige matter greatly. Overall, this process of weighting analysis and narrative based on general acceptance in the field of the private publisher does not operate scientifically (i.e., junk work product is not necessarily filtered out) but operates to support the status quo such that those with significant influence (e.g., insiders) may effectively obtain or purchase useful information (bearing in mind that information need not accurately reflect reality to be useful, and information available in the public domain is often stale and irrelevant). Thus, useful information trumps truthful or publicly available information on the strength of the bona fides and reputation of the private publisher.
For example, information made available to select clients by a high powered (crisis) management consulting firm may figuratively move markets independent of whether the information is true, potentially resulting in huge profit-taking by such privileged recipients. Consider whether a newsworthy event such as the public health risk of ebola goes the way of the posited swine flu pandemic of a few years back or the path of the black plague of a few centuries back – this is a scientific | medical issue for the public as well as a public domain information issue for the markets. Qui bono?
