Addicts subsidising footballers. Rugby league clubs are joining in the campaign against federal government attempts to limit the losses of those unfortunate few addicted to playing poker machines with a television advertisement featuring former player Steve Mortimer. The message is that football will suffer from the severe loss of revenue the changes will bring.

What is not said in this campaign by the licensed club industry is that the only real losers would be football players and what rational person would think that it is sensible to tax addicts to overpay a footballer?

No reason to have been ignorant. I hope that the board members of the Reserve Bank at their meeting today spent a little time reminding themselves how negligent they were over the activities of their bank note printing subsidiary.

The official statement from the bank after the Federal police made its recent arrests claimed that directors from the bank were unaware of the bribery and corruption that went on to secure the lucrative export contracts. I believe that any prudent director should have been aware of the dangers of such practices. As the Melbourne Age mentioned in one of its early reports on this scandal, there is a long history of scandal in the international note printing business.

American journalist Murray Bloom outlined this in 1983, when he published The Brotherhood of Money.

As The Age summarised his findings back in 2009:

Henry Keith, a former legendary sales executive for American Bank Note Company in Latin America between the 1930s and ’50s, told Bloom that bribery was common. “When a competitor gets his first hook into your account ? you know damned well he’s going to move heaven and earth ? and bribe God knows who ? to get more business to entrench himself,” Keith said. He also spoke of the “necessary and controversial” role of middlemen in foreign countries who were able to help secure deals for currency companies. According to Keith, the best agents were from “well connected, prominent local families”.

Bloom discovered that some of the world’s biggest banknote companies had engaged senior politicians and central bank figures as agents who would receive commissions on the completion of successful deals. Said Keith: “In one case (our agent) was an ex-minister of foreign affairs. In Ecuador, it was an ex-general named Cobo, Comandante Cobo, who made a fortune from his 5 per cent commission.”

Since Bloom penned his book, currency companies have continued to run into trouble; British banknote printer De La Rue is under investigation by London’s Serious Fraud Office over claims of corruption in Africa. Germany’s Giesecke and Devrient stopped supplying money to Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe after a request from the German Government. The American Bank Note Holigraphics Company was fined a few years ago after it was accused of breaching the US corruption laws in connection to a payment to a Swiss bank account that was aimed at influencing Saudi Government officials.

Export growth returning. This morning’s trade figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show exports almost back to the levels of before the world financial crisis.

In seasonally adjusted terms, goods and services exports rose $813m (3%) in May to $26,258m. Non-monetary gold rose $536m (49%), rural goods rose $172m (6%) and non-rural goods rose $103m (1%). Net exports of goods under merchanting remained steady at $35m. Services credits rose $1m.

The balance on goods and services was a surplus of $2,333m in May 2011, a rise of $716m on the surplus in April 2011.