offshore financial centre

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pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

See wealth Neville (Guernsey-based wealth manager), 115–16 Nick (Panama-based wealth manager), 104, 136, 234, 257, 287 Nigel (Singapore-based wealth manager), 92 Nigeria, 259 noblesse oblige, 275, 292 nominee shareholders, 183–84, 185 North, Douglass, 212 Northern Trust Company, 52, 52, 127, 191 notaries, 57–58 oaths, 40–41 Occupy Wall Street, 224–25 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development): elites seek autonomy from institutions such as, 43; financial secrecy and opacity opposed by, 298; hypocrisy regarding tax avoidance, 239; Seoul Declaration on tax avoidance, 12–13; on slowing economic inequality, 202–3; tax havens opposed by, 55, 256, 257, 261; wealth managers seen as under attack by, 23 offshore finance, 128–35; characteristic features of offshore financial centers, 129–33; competition between jurisdictions, 134–35; corporations, 12, 182–84, 185; counterlegislation by offshore financial centers, 171; for debt avoidance, 156–58; in defining bounds of family, 277; diverse characters involved in, 136; “divide-and-conquer” strategy for, 135; divorce-protection trusts, 162–64; economic development reduced by, 219–20; in economic inequality, 194, 196, 219–20, 275; economic prosperity results from, 268; for family-business protection, 168–71; as Faustian bargain for offshore financial centers, 268; “feudal remnants” in, 37–38; the finance curse for offshore financial centers, 247; flee clauses in trusts, 175, 176, 177; foundations, 180–81; Gates’ failure to use, 123–24; in global capital flows, 21; increase in wealth held offshore, 207; lawless zones created by, 295–97; as parasitic on traditional state system, 296–97; as permissive environment for financial-legal creativity, 173; political climate of offshore financial centers, 261; political instability and corruption as reason for using, 140–49; private investment opportunities, 212; scattering assets in, 133–35; in secrecy jurisdictions, 260; seen as scam, 131–32; sovereignty of offshore nations, 296–97; special-purpose vehicles in, 19; states in development of, 239; for tax avoidance, 133, 134, 135, 136, 174–75, 219; for tax sheltering, 47; for trade-restriction avoidance, 159–60; transporting cash to offshore banks, 138–40; trusts, 75, 125, 167–68, 176–77, 185, 191; ultra-freedom in offshore financial centers, 259; wealth management and development of, 5–6; Westphalian state system threatened by, 293–97 Olympic Games, 285 1 percent, 200–201; average annual income of, 200; growth in wealth of, 200; renewed interest in, 195–96; wealth of global, 201 opinion letters, 210 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

This process has been described more formally as follows: “A transnational bourgeoisie exercises its class power through a dense network of supranational institutions and relationships that increasingly bypass formal states, and in conjunction, through the utilization of national governments as territorially-bound juridical units (the interstate system), which are transformed into transmission belts and filtering devices.”83 The British Virgin Islands—which is now one of the world’s leading offshore finance centers—offers a vivid case study of this phenomenon. A captured state? In 1984, the British Virgin Islands passed the International Business Corporation (IBC) Act, which radically transformed the offshore financial industry and catapulted the BVI into its current position as one of the leading tax havens in the world.84 How the law came into being makes for an interesting illustration of the relationship between states, as representatives of the local public interest, and wealth management professionals, as the representatives of the narrower set of interests belonging to high-net-worth individuals from around the world.

See STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) sole practitioners, 70–72, 73 South Africa: political instability in, 141–42; trust failure in, 58; white male expats in wealth management, 265, 266 South Sea Bubble (1720), 49, 181, 314n44 sovereignty: elites “hack,” 259–62, 267, 269; impaired system of state, 293; of Jersey, 294; of offshore nations, 296–97; popular, 18, 268–69, 289; strategic uses of, 289; in tax havens, 256–57, 259–62; who benefits from, 267 special-purpose vehicles, 19 spendthrift trusts, 155, 157, 216 Stan (Chicago-based wealth manager), 69 standardization, 61–62, 280, 282 Stanford, R. Allen, 159, 260–61, 268 STAR (Special Trusts Alternative Regime) structure, 168, 169, 170–71, 177, 185, 276 state, the: assets seized by, 148; authority of, 21, 25, 76, 236, 240, 243–52, 253, 268, 269, 289, 292; balance of power between the wealthy and, 244, 291; “big government,” 252; as bugbear of offshore-finance clients, 136; in building of offshore finance, 255–56; captured states, 260, 262–67; development and the postcolonial conundrum, 253–67; dynastic wealth as challenge to, 243–52, 268–69; elites assert their autonomy from the, 43, 128, 314n29; family institutions that rival those of, 250–51; a new state system, 293–97; parallel system for the wealthy, 296; perceived governance gap, 252, 272; the professions’ relationship to, 233; purpose of, 236–43; stateless super-rich, 289, 290–93; STEP on, 236–37; supersession of nation-state, 235, 267; taxes fund, 237–38; vulnerability of the nation-state, 133–34; wealth confiscated by, 146; wealth management’s independence from, 233–34, 297, 303; wealth management strategies in countries with functional government and rule of law, 149–60; wealth managers and confiscatory, 12; wealth managers’ conflicted position regarding, 17–18, 21–22, 25, 233–70, 272, 289, 297; Westphalian system, 133, 234, 235, 290, 293–97.


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

This study cites a figure of 54 percent in 1999, which is based on a relatively restrictive definition of offshore; subsequent measurements are affected, according to the IMF, because “the distinction between onshore and offshore banking has become progressively blurred.” 3.Data from Palan et al., Tax Havens; from “IMF Finds ‘Trillions’ in Undeclared Wealth,” Wealth Bulletin, March 15, 2010; and from M. K. Lewis, “International Banking and Offshore Finance: London and the Major Centres,” in Mark P. Hampton and Jason P. Abbott, eds., Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens: The Rise of Global Capital (London: Macmillan Business, 1999). 4.The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2008 that 83 of the nation’s hundred biggest corporations had subsidiaries in tax havens; the following year the Tax Justice Network, an advocacy organization that criticizes tax havens, used a broader definition of a tax haven and found that 99 of Europe’s 100 largest companies used offshore subsidiaries. 5.This loose definition is the result of collegiate discussions among members of the Tax Justice Network and other contacts primarily in the United States.

CHAPTER 1 WELCOME TO NOWHERE 1.These figures should be taken as very rough estimates, not least because there is no agreement as to what a tax haven is, and estimates can vary widely. Once we understand that the United States and United Kingdom are major tax havens, the eye-catch figure is quite reasonable, if vague. This particular statistic is from French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a speech to the Paris Group of Experts in March 1999; quoted in J. Christensen and M. Hampton, “All Good Things Come to an End,” The World Today (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 55, nos. 8–9 (1999). The share has grown substantially since then, because offshore financial services have been growing at substantially faster rates than the growth in trade. 2.See Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 51.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-10501-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Shaxson, Nicholas. Treasure islands : uncovering the damage of offshore banking and tax havens / Nicholas Shaxson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-230-10501-0 1. Tax evasion—United States. 2. Tax havens. 3. Banks and banking, Foreign. I. Title. HV6344.U6S53 2011 364.1’338—dc22 2010035424 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


pages: 121 words: 34,193

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan, Thomas Piketty

Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, dematerialisation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, high net worth, income inequality, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, transfer pricing

In all cases, the large countries can legally make the giants of offshore banking bend, using relatively small coalitions. The Case of Luxembourg One country poses a problem, however, because it is protected from trade tariffs through European treaties: Luxembourg. Should it be excluded from the EU? The question deserves to be asked, because the Luxembourg that cofounded the Union in 1957 has nothing to do with the Luxembourg of today. Steel was everything back then; finance was nothing. Today, without its financial industry, the Grand Duchy would be nothing; tomorrow, offshore finance may be everything (see fig. 6). It is the tax haven of all tax havens, present in all stages of the circuit of international wealth management, used by all other financial centers.

There are no technical obstacles to the measures I propose. The resistance from tax havens is not insurmountable, either: it can be broken by the threat of proportional trade sanctions. Although solutions exist, governments have not been stellar up to now in their boldness or determination. It is thus high time to make them face up to their responsibilities. It is up to the citizens to mobilize, in Europe and perhaps above all in the tax havens. I don’t believe that the majority of the inhabitants of Luxembourg—hardly 50% of which voted in the last elections—approve of the capture of the Grand Duchy by offshore finance. Nor do most Swiss accept the active aid that their bankers provide the billionaires who go there to avoid their fiscal obligations.

Nothing in the logic of free exchange justifies this theft. What Is to Be Done? For some, the battle against tax havens has been viewed as lost from the start. From London to Delaware, from Hong Kong to Zurich, offshore banking centers are essential cogs in the financial machine of capitalism, used by the rich and powerful throughout the world. We can’t do anything about them, we’re told: some countries will always impose less tax and fewer rules than their neighbors. Money will always find a safe haven: strike here, it will go over there. Capitalism without tax havens is a utopia, and a progressive taxation of income and fortunes is destined to fail, unless we choose the path of protectionism.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The globalization of the financial system was catalyzed by a variety of factors, most notably liberalization of financial transactions through the removal of international exchange controls, the demise of the fixed-rate exchange mechanisms conceived at Bretton Woods in 1944, the extensive deregulation of financial markets during the 1980s, and the emergence of new communication technologies that put money transfers into effect at the click of a mouse. The huge expansion of the financial services industry in the 1980s and 1990s saw the number of offshore tax havens increase from twenty-five in the early 1970s to seventy-two by the end of 2005.17 More countries are lining up to create their own offshore finance centers. In February 2006, for example, John Kufuor, president of Ghana, announced his government’s intention to proceed with legislation to allow offshore financial services to be provided in Accra in a joint venture with British banking group Barclays.18 Interestingly, thirty-five of the seventy-two havens are linked to the City of London, either through direct constitutional ties to Britain or through membership in the British Commonwealth.

Lobbies decision makers to change policies, and researches and promotes positive alternatives. Networks with people’s movements in the developing world. Dirty Money and Offshore Banking Baker, Raymond. Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free Market System. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Epstein, Gerald. Capital Flight and Capital Controls in Developing Countries. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2005. Epstein, Gerald, ed. Financialization and the World Economy. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2006. Hampton, Mark, and Jason Abbott. Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens: The Rise of Global Capital. London: Macmillan, 1999. Kochan, Nick. The Washing Machine: How Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Soils Us.

In short, offshore tax havens undermine economic growth and cause poverty. A few checks through the academic literature of the 1980s confirmed that there were virtually no studies of the role of tax havens or how they were interacting with the emerging globalized financial markets. Offshore finance still scarcely gets a mention in specialist texts on capital markets and world trade, let alone in the mainstream texts studied by economics undergraduates in universities around the world.4 This is an important omission, especially when you consider that one-half of world trade passes through tax havens, on paper if not in reality, and that trillions of dollars flow daily through the offshore networks.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

John Christensen remembers this pressure from his days when he was the official economic adviser to the tax haven of Jersey. He recalls choking with anger during meetings yet feeling immense pressure to conform to what offshore finance wanted from the island. ‘It took real strength to stand up and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t agree with this.” I felt like the little boy farting in church.’ Many years after leaving Jersey and setting up the Tax Justice Network to combat tax havens, he says he is still a hate figure in Jersey financial circles. In such places the capture of the tax haven by offshore financial interests – or financial capture – often extends into family life itself.

The place is suffused by an attitude that characterises every tax haven I’ve visited or studied: don’t rock the boat, don’t ask questions, and don’t do anything to threaten the offshore financial sector. Bend over backwards, bend the law, look the other way, and do everything possible to keep your financial centre ‘competitive’. Meanwhile, tell outsiders that it is clean, responsible and well regulated – and that it is not a tax haven. This consensus pervades Luxembourg; all the main newspapers follow it, and most Luxembourgers believe it.7 Usually the mechanisms to control financial dissidents in a tax haven are subtle: an invisible melting away of job chances, a bias in the courts, family disapproval or social scorn.

And when the victims tried to get their money back from the banks responsible, Luxembourg took the banks’ side every time. ‘It is unbelievable, it is a scandal,’ Bomans continued. ‘We have no access to justice, thanks to the Luxembourg judicial system.’9 Luxembourg is the classic tax haven, captured wholesale, laws and all, by offshore finance. With one hand Juncker nurtured a huge expansion in this Euro-beacon of offshore finance, neoliberal deregulation, laxity in policing financial crime and national ‘competitiveness’. With the other he used the wealth thus acquired to shower Luxembourgers with highly progressive spending and social policies. This seemingly contradictory behaviour should be familiar to many of us, for it has formed the economic heart of an agenda that has enraptured a generation of Western politicians and underpinned the main economic strategies of many countries for more than a quarter of a century.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

The Panama Papers: Exposing the Rogue Offshore Finance Industry. Available at www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/. International Monetary Fund. “Corporate Taxation in the Global Economy,” IMF Policy Paper no. 19/007, March 2019. Jakobsen, Katrine, Kristian Jakobsen, Henrik Kleven, and Gabriel Zucman. “Wealth Taxation and Wealth Accumulation: Theory and Evidence from Denmark.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 24371, 2018, forthcoming in Quarterly Journal of Economics. Johannesen, Niels, and Gabriel Zucman. “The End of Bank Secrecy? An Evaluation of the G20 Tax Haven Crackdown.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 6, no. 1 (2014): 65–91.

It is almost impossible in the context of a random audit to detect the use of offshore bank accounts, exotic trusts, hidden shell corporations, and other sophisticated forms of tax evasion. Most of these forms of tax dodging occur via legal and financial intermediaries, many of which operate in countries with a great deal of financial opacity. To supplement random audits, one needs to use other sources of information that can capture these complex forms of tax evasion. These sources include leaks from offshore financial institutions—like the 2016 “Panama Papers,” a leak of internal documents from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca—and tax amnesties—government programs where tax evaders are encouraged to come clean in exchange for reduced penalties.

Even the purchase of office space in Ireland by foreign multinationals might simply be a veneer of legitimacy meant to obscure the profits artificially shifted into the island—what looks like movements of tangible capital in the data may merely serve as cover up. 4.2 PAPER PROFITS ARE MOVING TO TAX HAVENS; REAL ACTIVITY LESS SO (Percentage of foreign profits, capital, and wages of US multinationals in tax havens) Notes: The figure depicts the evolution of the profits booked, tangible capital owned, and wages paid by US multinationals in tax havens since 1965, expressed as a fraction of the total foreign (i.e., non-US) profits, capital, and wages of US multinationals. The share of foreign profits booked in tax havens has surged from less than 5% in the 1960s to almost 60% today but workers and capital haven’t moved to tax havens nearly as much. Complete details at taxjusticenow.org.


pages: 301 words: 88,082

The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business by Richard Brooks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, financial deregulation, financial engineering, haute couture, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, mega-rich, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, shareholder value, short selling, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, two and twenty

The implications go beyond immediate tax loss. Tax breaks available only to the largest multinationals hamper the competiveness of smaller ones that can’t cut their tax bills with an offshore finance company or by shifting their brand names into a tax haven. What’s more, tax concessions for diverting profits into tax havens will take jobs out of the country. In simple terms, if a company can easily send its foreign profits into a tax haven using the standard tax tools of interest, royalties and other payments, but has more trouble doing so with its UK ones, it has an incentive to locate real activity, such as a factory, outside the UK.

By limiting offshore movements of funds, exchange controls had prevented companies simply moving large amounts of capital into the world’s tax havens where it could turn a quick tax-free buck. With large offshore financial flows restricted to payments for goods, services and genuine investment, cross-border tax avoidance had been restricted to ‘transfer pricing’ schemes. These involved the manipulation of prices of transactions between companies in different countries and against which laws, albeit imperfect ones, had existed for thirty years. But with the shackles removed from international finance, a simple trick became easier and, for many companies, irresistible. Money could be placed in a tax haven subsidiary company in return for share capital in that company, and then either invested or even lent back to the British company from which it came in the first place.

The academics who crunched the numbers concluded categorically that ‘the era of bank secrecy is not over’.‌23 Since 2011 the tax information exchange programme has gathered momentum through European Union directives and OECD agreements insisting on automatic exchange of information between member countries and their overseas territories, spurred on by action taken in the US to force offshore banks to hand over details of US citizens’ income under its Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. But none of this addresses the fundamental flaw in the process: that tax havens have neither the will or the laws or the capability to gather much of the information in the first place. And while the information exchange negotiations continue front stage, behind the scenes, the bankers, lawyers and accountants that serve tax havens regroup. They continue tax-evading, regulation-sidestepping businesses but now with international endorsement.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

The original investigation into the phenomenon is Geoffrey Bell’s groundbreaking The Eurodollar Market and the International Financial System. Andrea Binder’s The Politics of the Invisible, Offshore Finance and State Power was very useful as well. Andrew Shonfield’s British Economic Policy Since the War (1958) is strangely not as dated as it should be; in fact, I’d quite like someone to write a similarly approachable book about economics today. David Kynaston’s Club No More, the fourth and final volume of his magisterial series on the City of London, has useful material on the development of offshore finance. The City Lives interviews can be found on the British Library website. Many of them have been transcribed, but the original recordings are also available, and hearing the actual voices of these pioneers is fascinating.

One Conservative MP, an accountant called David Shaw who represented the port city of Dover, understood the threat that the BVI’s innovations posed to the rest of the world and in 1992 proposed regulations to stop them. He recognised, decades earlier than his peers, that secrecy encourages fraud, just like dark alleys encourage street crime, and proposed a bill that would stop British accountants and lawyers from working in tax havens. ‘The main problem caused by tax havens is that they allow transactions to take place in conditions of extreme secrecy,’ he said. ‘Too many tax havens have traditional relationships with the United Kingdom. That is no excuse for allowing their economies to develop around fraud.’ Even couched in such terms he failed to attract much support, and his proposed legislation didn’t even secure a second reading in the House of Commons.

Fortuna United LP might be registered in Scotland and therefore look respectable to the casual observer, but it was actually controlled by two companies in the Seychelles, a notorious tax haven where ownership of companies is a closely guarded secret. A Scottish limited partnership (SLP) could import the dodgiest excesses of tax havens into the UK and turn them into a respectable-looking investment vehicle. A Seychelles-registered company was an automatic red flag for any half-competent bank compliance officer, but a partnership based in Scotland looked legitimate. In reality, an SLP was even worse than a shell company in a tax haven. We have no way of knowing who owns a company in the Seychelles, but at least someone in the Seychelles does.


pages: 192 words: 72,822

Freedom Without Borders by Hoyt L. Barber

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, diversification, El Camino Real, estate planning, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, money market fund, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, quantitative easing, reserve currency, road to serfdom, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail

I don’t recommend it, but in Italy, it’s said to be a national sport! THE T-8 TAX HAVENS AND OFFSHORE BANKING CENTERS Eight outstanding jurisdictions today have emerged from the long list of tax havens worldwide, which number approximately 40. Unfortunately, and for many reasons, only around one-quarter of them are worth consideration for North Americans. I developed my annual list of T-8 tax havens, the best tax havens and offshore banking centers in the world, to help assist with the selection of the choicest ones today. As of 2010–2011, the following tax havens rank high: Belize, Panama, Cook Islands, Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Anguilla, Switzerland / Liechtenstein, and Hong Kong.

Therefore, the annual T-8 list has been developed as a practical reference for identifying the best tax havens and offshore banking centers for maximizing profits, privacy, and financial protection in today’s volatile world. It is also referred to as the “Green List” of tax havens. This list is revised as required to maintain the integrity of the benefits of those countries listed, and it is publicized annually for the public’s awareness. The selected countries were chosen based on my 12 criteria for evaluating a tax haven. The 12 factors essential to determining the best tax haven to use for a given purpose are the following: 1. Tax structure 2.

The corporate charter gives the broadest of powers to the corporation and the maximum benefits to the beneficial owners. Unlike some tax havens, Panama allows a Panama corporation to redomicile to another jurisdiction at anytime. Panama is very much like a cross between Hong Kong and Switzerland as a renowned tax haven and offshore banking and shipping center, without any of the drawbacks, such as the recent banking developments in Switzerland or mainland China’s control of Hong Kong. Panama has been a tax haven and offshore banking center since the 1920s, making it one of the oldest, and it’s comparable in that way to Liechtenstein, both being based on civil law and not English common law.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

“Expedited Serices,” Delaware Division of Corporations, https://corp.delaware.gov/expserv/9. 23. Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven.” 24. Chuck Collins, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021). 25. “Asset Protection for Non-Resident Aliens,” DelawareInc.com, https://www.delawareinc.com/asset-protection/non-resident-aliens/. 26. Christopher Bruner, Re-Imagining Offshore Finance (London: Oxford University Press, 2016). 27. Bryce Tuttle, “Laboratories of Secrecy: Why Some U.S. States Have Sold Their Sovereignty to Criminals and Kleptocrats,” Stanford University, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/43705473/LABORATORIES_OF_SECRECY_Why_Some_U_S_States_Have_Sold_Their_Sovereignty_to_Criminals_and_Kleptocrats. 28. 

Mark Anderson, “Foreign Aid Close to Record Peak After Donors Spend $135bn in 2014,” Guardian, 8 April 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/08/foreign-aid-spending-2014-least-developed-countries. 19. “Revealed: Global Super-Rich Has at Least $21 Trillion Hidden in Secret Tax Havens,” Tax Justice Network, 22 July 2012, https://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/The_Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_Presser_120722.pdf. 20. Libby Nelson, “A Top Expert on Tax Havens Explains Why the Panama Papers Barely Scratch the Surface,” Vox, 8 April 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11371712/panama-papers-tax-haven-zucman. 21. Zack Beauchamp, “How Donald Trump’s Kleptocracy Is Undermining American Democracy,” Vox, 31 July 2017, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/31/15959970/donald-trump-authoritarian-children-corruption. 22. 

Tim Johnson, “Expecting Rules to Tighten Around Shell Companies After Panama Papers? Not Likely,” McClatchy, 1 August 2016, https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article92679482.html. 43. Phippen, “Nevada, a Tax Haven for Only $174.” 44. Interview with author. 45. “Despite Connection to Panama Papers Nevada Likely to Remain Tax Haven,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, 7 August 2016, https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/despite-connection-to-panama-papers-nevada-likely-to-remain-tax-haven/. 46. Interview with author. 47. Interview with author. 48. Steve Reilly, “Dozens of Firms Creating Foreign-Based Shell Companies in Two U.S. States,” USA Today, 26 May 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/05/26/dozens-firms-creating-foreign-based-shell-companies-two-us-states/84222480/. 49. 


pages: 470 words: 125,992

The Laundromat : Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, central bank independence, Charlie Hebdo massacre, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, high net worth, income inequality, independent contractor, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

The pseudonymous account holder would sign a separate side agreement with the agency admitting he did not actually own the money in the account. By the mid-1980s, the CIA’s involvement had expanded into tax havens, as David Fischer, the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, discovered. Located in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia, the Seychelles served as a stop on the slave trade and a listening post during the Cold War, but its biggest impact on the global economy has been as a tax haven. The island’s ruler, France-Albert René,46 seized power in a coup in 1977 and held it for thirty years. He turned the country into a hub for offshore banking and money laundering. The Gambino crime family in New York and gunrunners in Libya, among others, washed cash in the Seychelles.

“Once you figure out the techniques, it’s not hard to figure out a class of people who are using them.” The U.S. government had not entirely ignored the problem. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under Delaware Republican senator William Roth issued a stinging report in 1985 titled “Crime and Secrecy: The Use of Offshore Banks and Companies.”11 Its conclusions were stark. Despite overwhelming evidence of dirty money in their banking systems, tax havens chose instead to “systematically obstruct U.S. law enforcement investigations.” The stonewalling eroded public trust in the U.S. justice system and left massive amounts of tax revenue uncollected. The report contributed to the passage in 1986 of legislation that for the first time made money laundering a federal crime.

Who was the intermediary who set up the structures and the sales pitch that brought the parties together? Second, how did the taxpayer move his money offshore? As with money laundering, an endless number of variations existed. Businessmen could route transactions via the Bahamas or other tax havens and skim profits into offshore bank accounts. They could falsify invoices to pay their offshore company or associates for services that never occurred. Another tactic involved selling assets to the offshore company at a loss, which not only transferred money but also provided a tax write-off. Third, West had to prove that the taxpayer covertly controlled the secret companies, trusts, and foundations.


pages: 354 words: 110,570

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, failed state, family office, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, Global Witness, high net worth, junk bonds, low interest rates, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Virgin Galactic

He then set about creating a fiction that major Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds also were involved in the purchase of the construction companies. If Low could make it appear as if his personal ventures were backed by powerful Middle Eastern funds, he could attract even more money. To create the illusion, he turned to the opaque world of offshore finance. Low knew about offshore financial centers from his father, Larry, who had a myriad of overseas accounts. It was normal for rich Asians, fearing instability at home, or just to evade taxes, to set up offshore accounts in secretive jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. The “offshore” designation typically refers to jurisdictions whose financial systems are much larger than their domestic economies; in other words, the banking system exists purely for nonresidents to stash cash, unlike international financial centers in London and New York that also service local citizens and companies.

Low had expected to make serious money for himself from the deal, and he was incensed when Khazanah turned down his request to be paid a broker fee. Run by professionals, the fund was too clean for Low’s purposes. Going forward, he really needed to control his own pot of investment money. To do so, Low prepared to dive deeply into the world of offshore finance. Chapter 5 A Nice Toy Washington, DC, August 2008 In the fall of 2008, Otaiba’s business partner, a Jordanian named Shaher Awartani, wrote him an email containing some very welcome news. The pair was about to make around $10 million through a deal that Low had set up in Malaysia. Perhaps worried about too many direct interactions with this Malaysian broker, Otaiba relied on Awartani to communicate with Low.

In recent years, offshore centers have come under pressure to share information on their clients. But many of these centers, reliant on annual fees from the thousands of companies seeking a cloak of secrecy, remain safe harbors for money launderers and other criminals to wash cash and avoid taxes. One recent estimate puts the money stashed in offshore financial centers since 1970 at $32 trillion—a figure equal to the combined economies of the United States and China—with hundreds of billions lost in tax revenues. The now twenty-six-year-old Low was already mastering this hidden realm of the global economy. He would have known that the Cayman Islands, home to branches of U.S. banks and hedge funds, had improved its information sharing with Washington.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Ronen Palan is a crucial authority on the development of offshore, and I am grateful to him for chatting to me, as well as for writing so many excellent papers. His books Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (co-written with Richard Murphy) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) and The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) are excellent. Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is very good as well. The quote from Bradley Birkenfeld comes from Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2016).

According to some recent research from Gabriel Zucman (the French economist at Berkeley), Swiss institutions’ share of the world’s offshore wealth has dipped from around 50 per cent to barely a quarter over the last decade. Asian tax havens are creeping up to join them. But is ‘offshore’ even a useful concept any more? If the best tax haven is now the United States, we may need a whole new term for the places that adapt their laws to accommodate the needs and whims of the nomadic Moneylanders. Curiously, perhaps the person I met who best appreciated what was happening was Mark Brantley, prime minister of the little Caribbean tax haven of Nevis, who spent fully ten minutes responding to a question about the importance of financial services to his island with a full-blooded condemnation of the United States.

He could buy himself a new car, or build himself a nice house, or give it to his friends and relatives, but that was more or less it. His appetites were limited by the fact that the local market could not absorb endless sums of money. If he kept stealing after that, the money would just build up in his house until he had no rooms left to put it in, or it was eaten by mice. Offshore finance changes that. Some people call shell companies getaway cars for dodgy money, but – when combined with the modern financial system – they’re more like magical teleporter boxes. If you steal money, you no longer have to hide it in a safe where the mice can get at it. Instead, you stash it in your magic box, which spirits it away at the touch of a button, out of the country, to any destination you choose.


pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

Too many politicians, journalists, and concerned citizens are poorly informed about how the kleptocrats operate, how the enablers serve their clients, how inadequate are current laws and the application of relevant financial regulations, and just how much cash we are now talking about. Never before has so much illicit finance flowed between nations. David Lipton, a former deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, has stated that the amount of private wealth estimated to be hidden in offshore financial centers, such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, amounts to $7 trillion, which is approximately 8 percent of global GDP.12 He noted that “much of which likely comes from illicit activities.” The total amount of dark money crossing the globe solely related to trade, according to research by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), amounted to $8.7 trillion in the ten years from 2008 to 2017, representing trade payments between 135 middle- and low-income countries and thirty-six advanced industrial nations.13 Add to this total the amount of cash that is stolen and shipped through non-trade-related channels by kleptocrats, oligarchs, and organized crime; then, the overall annual volume of illicit finance crossing borders may well be double GFI’s estimate—exceeding $2 trillion per year.

Each is found to have remained persistently high over the period between 2005 and 2014. Combined, these outflows and inflows are estimated to account for between 14.1 and 24.0 percent of developing country trade, on average. GFI research suggests that about 45 percent of illicit flows end up in offshore financial centers, and 55 percent in developed countries. 14. Many academics and lawyers have tended to focus a good deal of their attention on defining corruption in terms of the affairs of government and public officials, perhaps influenced by the famed dictum by Lord Acton, a nineteenth-century British politician, who stated: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

While GDP is just one among many measures of well-being, the improvement is remarkable. But before we start celebrating, consider these numbers, which point to the dark side of the global economy: $7 trillion—that figure, equal to 8 percent of global GDP, represents the amount of private wealth estimated to be hidden in offshore financial centers, much of which likely comes from illicit activities. $1 trillion—that’s the gain in government revenue, by one calculation, that could be achieved by reducing corruption around the world by one-third.” Substantial background to the IMF’s work on corruption and the formula tion of its updated policy (finalized in 2018) is provided in its August 2017 policy paper: “The Role of the Fund in Governance Issues: Review of the Guidance Note – Preliminary Considerations – Background Notes.”


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

If you really want to be in Switzerland or Germany, then realize that you will need to spend much more of your time, money and peace of mind to do so. The country that tops my list, however, is Georgia. Georgia is hands down the easiest place in the world to open an offshore bank account today. Because it is somewhere in the middle of the offshore spectrum, a jurisdiction like Georgia has not seen the problems you find at the top and bottom of the offshore world, precisely because it is not a tax haven, nor is it a large offshore financial center. It is not even on the radar of the vast majority of the world. It is possible to open a bank account in Georgia with as little as $7. The process at my favorite banks takes as little as ten minutes.

Misconception #3: Offshore Banks are for People Who Want to Avoid Taxes The term ‘tax haven’ in general is a troubling one. As with privacy versus secrecy, it is a term that is often misused as a way of appealing to people who are trying to run from their legal tax obligations rather than set things up properly. This is completely unnecessary. There are ways to legally live overseas, operate your business overseas, and bank your money overseas, all without paying tax, but it is not so simple as upping sticks and moving to Panama. You should be concerned by anybody who talks a lot about tax havens and how you should move to a tax haven country.

Even Panama has recently experienced their own little scandal, but it was never on my list of favorites anyway. Then there are the tax havens like the Seychelles where the banks are hanging by a thread. You also have European strongholds like Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg that are part of the old offshore world and, for many individuals and businesses, no longer offer the perfect panacea for offshore banking. And in countries like Cyprus and Ukraine, the banks are either run by the mob or have fallen flat on their face in recent years. As a general rule, do not bother banking in any of these countries. But who takes the title of “The worst offshore bank?” You might think that a small bank in a rather inaccessible part of the world with early 2000s technology would earn such a title.


pages: 241 words: 63,981

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

In the era of digital money, funds deposited in Jersey one minute can be in London the next, and that is exactly what will happen by the close of evening each day. The destination may be different in the case of other tax havens, but the principle will be the same. In each case, the offshore bank account is just a conduit. It offers a record of money in the tax haven that is not there. That money will have come from outside the tax haven in the first place, and will have departed for a major banking centre within hours of its arrival. The claim that the cash is in the tax haven is simply a sham: it is no more there than the owner of the account is. All the account does is provide what has been, at least to date, a secretive mechanism to obscure the ownership of money whose economic impact is most definitely felt elsewhere.

A glance at the list of banks in Guernsey, for example, does reveal some names that will not be readily familiar to those outside the financial services sector, but also discloses the Bank of Cyprus (from another tax haven), Barclays, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS, Rothschild’s, SG Hambros, and Skipton International, which is a branch of a UK building society. The same pattern can be found in almost any tax haven. There is little point in thinking of these offshore banks as different operations: the reality is that they are, to a very great extent, one and the same thing as their onshore operations. The final component that makes up the offshore world is wealth managers.

And all of that will become possible because the top-down corruption that tax havens have fed, which has given rise to abuse throughout public and commercial life in far too many countries, will have been cut off at its roots. The opportunity for corrupt funds to remain forever hidden will be eliminated if tax haven activity is shattered by a new era of transparency. In short, in many countries the end of the tax haven era might deliver hope where it has been hard to find. Tax Havens in the Post–Tax Haven Era There remains the questions of what will happen to the finance industry in tax havens in a post–tax haven world, and where that might leave the places that have made this activity fundamental to their economies.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

As Nav’s assets had soared, the trader had expressed an interest in finding new ways to make money, and James lined him up with his contacts, including his younger companion that day, Miles MacKinnon. Once inside, the three men were taken to a meeting room filled with legal tomes where they were met by Andrew Thornhill, one of the country’s preeminent tax barristers, as well as a fifth individual, who specialized in offshore finance and who had organized the meeting. On the agenda, a subject close to all their hearts: what to do with Nav’s large and rapidly expanding fortune. Since 1969, Thornhill had been advising aristocrats and business magnates on how to structure their affairs to minimize tax without falling foul of the perennial foe, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs.

After listening to Nav and his advisers explain the problem in a hotel lobby off the Strand, he suggested tearing down the entire Nevis edifice and starting again. A few weeks later, in October 2011, he wrote to Nav laying out the proposal in detail. Harvey’s plan, which Nav approved, was even more complicated than Thornhill’s. Based around what’s known as a “personal portfolio bond,” it encapsulates why many people regard the offshore financial system with disdain. First, Harvey appointed a small, friendly offshore insurer named Atlas Insurance Management to establish a new company in Anguilla with the name International Guarantee Corporation, or IGC. Next, Atlas established a bond whose only investment was ownership of IGC. Finally, the roughly $30 million in cash sitting in one of the Nevis trusts was transferred into the entity.

The CFTC, the designated regulator for the futures industry, had begun investigating Sarao on a tip-off back in 2012. But as a civil body it has limited powers, so it referred the matter to the DOJ in 2014. Now they were working together. After getting the go-ahead, Le Riche, the head of the CFTC’s investigation, fired off a series of prewritten emails instructing Sarao’s brokers and offshore banks to freeze his accounts. Sometime before noon, Nav was handcuffed and led outside. As they were leaving, he said to one of the officers, “Wait a minute, bruv.” There was a football match on television that night, and Nav wanted to run upstairs and record it. “I’m not sure you’ll have time to watch that, son,” came the reply.


Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Welcoming dirty money is profitable for American companies, and it helps fill the current-account deficit. And Europeans, it seems, are hardly better behaved. Most people are dimly aware of a murky world of offshore finance. But how big is the problem? Try these for size. The OECD reckons that about half of all the world’s cross-border trade involves structures for concealing money, involving about 70 tax havens (the French poetically call them “fiscal paradises”)3, as corporations and rich individuals shuffle profits around to avoid taxes and for yet more nefarious reasons.4 Assets held offshore by rich individuals, beyond the reach of effective taxation, equal one-third of total global assets—or $11 trillion, conservatively estimated, costing governments over $250 billion a year in tax revenues.

(NNPC), 1 Ninjas, 112, 118 Nkossa oilfield, 106 Nkrumah, Kwame, 19 Noble Energy, 129, 160 Norquist, Grover, 226 Norris, Chester, 131 North Korea, 4, 35, 122, 150, 227 Norway, 5, 84, 93 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 17, 19–21, 24, 147, 158, 159, 161, 200, 201, 203, 205, 208 Occidental, Oxy, 111–113 Odi, 200 Odili, Peter, 200, 203 277 P o i s o n e d We l l s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), 96 Offor, Emeka, 155–158 offshore finance, see taxation, tax havens, tax evasion oil and gas 1970s price boom, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15–18, 21–23, 96, 110, 115, 185, 197 1980s price crash, 4, 21–24, 51, 110, 197 companies, see individual company name contracts, contract renegotiations, 2, 14–15, 35–38, 39, 45, 46, 71, 92, 99, 104, 106, 111, 112, 116, 129, 130, 141, 146, 152, 153, 155–162, 196, 197, 216 corruption, see corruption cost base, “cost oil,” 2, 39, 46, 99 enclave syndrome, 46, 49, 185, 230 exploration, production, reserves, geology, 2, 21, 27, 35, 36, 38, 42–43, 66, 104, 105, 121, 146, 152, 155, 159, 177, 190, 194, 212 licensing, licences, 15, 43, 70, 80, 113, 152–160, 162, 165, 181, 197, 205, 220 markets, 3, 64, 189–90, 202, 205, 214 natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), gas flares,17, 43, 100, 107, 122, 143, 190, 194–195 oil funds, savings, 24, 163–164, 231 oil money flowing through African politics and societies, 15–16, 21–25, 36–37, 44–47, 50–55, 76–78, 80–82, 94, 97, 99, 235 onshore activities, 57, 107, 193–208 Resource Curse, see Resource Curse revenue shares, sharing, allocation, 1, 15, 37, 38, 111, 112, 141, 142, 152–153, 156, 159, 196, 203 signature bonuses, 153, 165 Ojukwu, Emeka, 13, 34 Oloibiri, 197 Opus Dei, see Freemasons, freemasonry Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 1, 5, 15, 75, 233 Ouattara, Alassane, 215 Ovimbundu, Ovimbundus, 50 palm oil, 13, 195–197, 202 Paradox of Plenty, see Resource Curse Partnership Africa Canada, 210 Pasqua, Charles, 87, 90, 151, 175, 176 Péan, Pierre, 76, 78, 79 Pérez Alfonzo, Juan Pablo, 5 PGS (Petroleum Geo-Services), 155 Pioneer Energy, 160 Pointe Noire, 105, 114, 117 Port Harcourt, 191–193, 203, 206 Portugal, Portuguese policy and history, 28, 41, 42, 49, 58, 82, 147–150, 185 Posser da Costa, Guilherme, 149, 150 poverty, human development, 4, 5, 185, 217, 224; see also Resource Curse Francophone countries, 101, 102, 122, 142–143 Nigeria, 22, 24, 54–55, 61, 197 Ping, Jean, 75 Pinto da Costa, Manuel, 150–151, 164 private creditors, “vulture funds,” 65, 110–113, 115–116, 176–181 Publish What You Pay, 217–218 Ransome-Kuti, Kuti Beko, 20, 25 Fela, see Kuti, Fela Anikulapo Femi, 20, 26 Raymond, Lee, 216 Reagan, Ronald, 23, 48, 172 religion, see Islam, Christianity, traditional religions, Nigeria, religion Rendjambé, Joseph, 80 Resource Curse, 5–7, 34, 215, 231, 235 conflict and fragmentation, 3, 4, 6, 23, 103–104, 116, 183, 196, 197, 205, 210–212, 229–230, 233, 235 corruption and governance, see corruption debt, see foreign debt Dutch disease, 5, 17–18, 42, 66, 81, 102, 118, 122 oil price volatility, see Nigeria, 1960s etc.; Congo Republic, debt etc. pollution, global warming, 6, 65, 194–195, 197, 204, 224 poverty, see poverty “privatization of the state,” 4–5, 115–117, 184, 186 “rents,” 38–40, 98–101 Ribadu, Nuhu, 207 Rice, Condoleeza, 143 Riggs Bank, 126–131, 135, 138–140; see also Equatorial Guinea Rivers State, Nigeria, 190–192, 200, 201, 203, 205 Robert, Maurice, 70, 72, 73, 76, 86 Rolling Dollar, Fatai, 20 Roque Santeiro, see informal markets Rose-Croix, Rosicrucians, see Freemasons, freemasonry 278 Index Rough Trade, 210 Rowland, Tiny, 169 Rumsfeld, Donald, 115, 137 Russia, 2, 50–51, 59, 158, 165–181, 191; see also Gaydamak, Arcadi; Soviet Union Rwanda, genocide, genocidaires, 83, 112, 114 Salinas, Carlos, 96 São Tomé e Principe, 101, 145–164, 169, 229–230 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 176 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 6, 25, 197–199, 204, 215 Sassou-Nguesso, Dénis, 78, 91, 105, 108, 109, 111, 113–116 Saudi Arabia, 1–3, 72, 100–101, 102, 121, 127, 140, 146, 192, 225, 226 Savimbi, Jonas, 41, 48–50, 56, 201, 212; see also UNITA “Seven Sisters,” 1, 14, 18, 71 Secret societies, 35, 68, 70, 76–78, 90, 91, 92, 102, 105, 111; see also Freemasons, freemasonry Service d’action civique (SAC), 78, 87 Shell, Royal Dutch/Shell, 1, 71, 93, 94, 194–198, 201, 204–205, 217 Shrine, Afrika Shrine, 19, 26 Simpson, Chris, 56 Silverstein, Ken, 128, 163 Sinopec, 181, 121 Sirven, Alfred, 90, 91, 93 Slaves, slavery, 19, 28, 42, 43, 106–107, 147, 196, 197, 202, 206, 224–227 Smith, Johan, 137 Smith, Stephen, 78, 91 Soares de Oliveira, Ricardo, 4, 116 Sonangol, 45, 46, 51, 52, 175–177, 179, 216–217 Soros, George, 179, 216 Soviet Union, Soviet ideology, 30, 34, 48–49, 69, 72, 105, 108, 110, 150, 169–172, 176, 178, 191, 214; see also Russia, Cold War Soyinka, Wole, 25, 207 Soyo, 57 Standard Chartered bank, 226 Stanley, Henry Morton, 107 Statoil, 36 Steinberg, Donald, 49 Stoddard, Ed, 201 Straw, Jack, 138 Suez bank, 226 Switzerland, Swiss magistrates, Swiss justice, 86, 88, 91, 96, 179–180, 182, 224, 225 Tapie, Bernard, 87 Tarallo, André, “Monsieur Afrique,” 87, 90, 91, 93, 109 Tax Justice Network, 226, 229 taxation, tax havens, tax evasion, 95–100, 126–131, 202, 213, 224–229 and Britain, city of London, see Britain, banking, money laundering, city of London bank secrecy, tax havens, general, 88, 91, 93, 95, 100–101, 109, 130, 131, 181, 227 and criminals, criminal money, terrorism, 23, 88, 96, 98, 170, 174, 221, 225, 227 Gabon, Congo, 91, 93, 95–98, 110, 115–116 Equatorial Guinea, 126–131, 136, 137 Gaydamak, 170, 174, 178–181 and globalization, 26, 170, 215–216, 220, 227, 229, 235 “no taxation without representation,” 18 Switzerland, see Switzerland, Swiss magistrates, Swiss justice taxation of the oil industry, 14, 36–38, 46, 71 U.S.

New loans were needed to pay off the old ones, and an addiction grew.19 Falling into arrears on salaries to the civil service was widely taken as a potent sign of political weakness, which in turn was a boon for Elf and other creditors: Congo’s leaders, an Elf official on trial in Paris later explained, had to “put up with” very high interest rates on Elf loans because they were so weak.20 Elf rescheduled Congo’s debts in exchange for new oil concessions,21 at bargain-basement prices, and provided new loans at exorbitant rates. Bribes flowed through Bongo’s Fiba bank and the tax havens, while politicians looted the treasury. Tax havens are like one-way filters for money, sucking African economies dry: once rulers get their cash out, they know it is safe. Under IMF-inspired privatization, French interests converted Congo’s debts into discounted shares of state firms. French businesses and networks gained footholds, building import, forestry, and gambling empires.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Whatever a loan might normally cost, it would cost Apple far less, thanks to a low-interest bond offering available only to blue-chip companies. Even better, Apple would not actually have to touch its bank accounts, which aren’t held someplace down the street like yours or mine. Rather, they are scattered in a variety of places around the globe, including offshore financial institutions. (The company is secretive about the details.) If that money were to return to the United States, Apple would have to pay hefty tax rates on it, something it has always studiously avoided, even though there is something a little off about a quintessentially American firm dodging a huge chunk of American taxes.

Bill George put the salient question succinctly: “Is the role of leading large pharmaceutical companies to discover lifesaving drugs, or to make money for shareholders through financial engineering?”4 Sadly, we know the answer, at least when it comes to Pfizer. Although Obama has proposed rules that could make it tougher for companies to relocate abroad specifically for tax reasons, politicians haven’t made a dent in the usual offshore financial wizardry practiced by many of the country’s largest firms. These tactics are particularly common in sectors like finance, technology, and pharmaceuticals—that is, intellectual-property-driven industries in which the virtual nature of assets (ideas, formulas, patents, algorithms, and the like) makes it especially easy to shift profits to the cheapest possible tax jurisdiction, regardless of where they really came from.

Shifting to a tax code that doesn’t give debt such preferential treatment would be a great way to shift the buyback dynamic, and this is a topic I will cover in much more depth in chapter 9. Cracking down on overseas tax havens and closing corporate loopholes is another obvious measure that’s long overdue. This is especially true given the fact that most other G8 nations are considering similar proposals, which would help offset some of the threat of a corporate race to the bottom, in which corporations offshore to the most attractive tax havens. Similarly, taxing capital gains on a sliding scale, with higher rates for shorter holding periods and lower rates for longer ones, could discourage the seekers of quick gains from distorting the markets.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Consider the rapid growth of US dollar deposits in London and other offshore banking centers in the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, which was a response to the increases in interest rates on these deposits relative to interest rates on bank deposits in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles that were subject to regulatory ceilings. The banks that sold these offshore deposits used the funds to make US dollar loans to American and non-American firms that they might otherwise have made from one of their US offices. The firms that borrowed US dollar funds from the offshore banks in London were as likely to spend these funds in the United States as if they had borrowed the US dollar funds in New York or some other US city.

Legislation and custom limited the amounts of deposit money that could be issued against primary bank reserves, starting shortly after the Bank Act of 1844 and continuing through the application by the Federal Reserve System of reserve requirements on both demand and time deposits (as embodied in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) and then on certificates of deposit and subsequently on the borrowings by US banks from their branches in offshore financial centers including London. The process is Sisyphean, a perpetuum mobile; the history of money is a story of continuing innovations so that the existing supply of money can be used more efficiently and the development of close substitutes for money that circumvent the regulatory requirements applied to the creation of money.

Interest rates on US dollar securities increased as the US inflation rate climbed; however interest rates on US dollar demand deposits were subject to ceilings that the Federal Reserve had adopted to limit competition among banks. These ceilings did not apply to interest rates on US dollar deposits in London and other foreign financial centers, which increased and induced investors to move funds from domestic to offshore financial centers. The rapid increases in money supply growth in the United States and other industrial countries in the early 1970s contributed to sharp increases in demand for primary products, and in the prices of oil, wheat, and other commodities. The rates of growth of GDP in the countries that produced these primary products increased.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

The study concluded: ‘Ownership concentration in modern Russia is much higher than in any country in continental Europe and higher than any country for which data is available.’5 Little of this unprecedented accumulation of wealth has been invested in Russia in business or charity. Rather, most of the money has been secreted abroad, with billions of dollars hidden in a labyrinth of offshore bank accounts in an array of tax havens, from Switzerland and Jersey to the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar. Much has ended up being deposited in and managed by British banks. Stashed away, it has been almost impossible to trace. Despite attempts by Russian and British law enforcement agencies, little of it has been recovered and requisitioned back to Russia.

If you’re looking to avoid tax legally, you’re as well going to London as anywhere else.’4 The UK boasts an unrivalled tax-avoidance industry - and an abundance of highly paid accountants able to devise complex ways of hiding an individual’s wealth. In 2007 the International Monetary Fund ranked London alongside Switzerland, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands as ‘an offshore financial centre’. Most countries have required their residents - including wealthy foreigners - to pay domestic taxes on their worldwide income and capital gains. In the UK foreigners can claim they are ‘domiciled’ abroad even though they may have lived in Britain for years and have British passports.

The broad consensus is that the privatization process was one of the most flawed economic reforms in modern history. Industrial production declined by some 60 per cent during the 1990s, vast swathes of the economy were wiped out, and much of the population was plunged into poverty. The vast amount of money that poured out of Russia to be hidden away in offshore bank accounts accentuated the dramatic economic crisis of 1998. During the 1990s, what was known as ‘capital flight’ became one of the country’s most debilitating economic problems. According to economists at Florida International University, ‘It erodes the country’s tax base, increases the public deficit, reduces domestic investment and destabilises financial markets.’35 The investment fund Hermitage Capital has estimated that between 1998 and 2004, £56 billion in capital flowed out of Russia, most ending up offshore.


pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

As the head of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, contended some critics, Bertone more than anyone should have been sensitive to how the motu proprio might restrict the church’s ability to operate under authoritarian governments like those in Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, and China. What might happen to the church’s “independent missions” in offshore financial havens such as the Turks and Caicos and the Cayman Islands? How could Bertone allow the church’s missionary arm to be subject to the stringent new financial oversight? Bertone’s strong support for the motu proprio reenergized an effort to force him from the Curia. Influential clerics had been trying to oust Bertone since 2009.

In direct language, he castigated Western countries for not responding more forcefully and faster to cope with the crisis, especially since the credit crunch disproportionally hammered the world’s poorest.11 In calling for reform, Benedict urged that a “necessary first step” was closing all international tax havens, which he said had “given support to imprudent economic and financial practices and have also played a significant role in the imbalances of development, allowing a gigantic flight of capital linked to tax evasion. Offshore markets could also be linked to the recycling of profits from illegal activities.”12 The Pontiff’s statement even listed some of the worst offending “offshore centers” such as “the Channel Islands.” It was not clear if Benedict fully realized the extent to which the super rich had used the Vatican Bank as a tax haven since its inception. But that December policy statement was only a warm-up for a Papal encyclical released the following July (2009).

Is it merely a coincidence that Generali and others began escheating Jewish life insurance policies only after Nogara had formed the IOR? The Vatican Bank was critical from its inception to business titans such as Volpi, men who recognized that since the IOR was not answerable to any country’s central banking authority, it was the world’s best offshore bank. Did Volpi and Nogara strike such a deal? Did the IOR provide that service for its own insurance company, Fondiaria? The answers, if any, are likely inside the sealed archives of the Vatican. But the church has refused even to acknowledge that it maintains any relevant financial and business records for those years.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Our starting point might be a tour of Westminster, stopping to peer through the windows of the Georgian townhouses where well-heeled political consultants and think tanks plot out election-winning strategies. We could stroll around the backstreets of the City of London, searching for insights into the murky world of offshore finance amid the brash, overflowing bars and restaurants. Or head straight to the global capital of undisclosed political influence, the sleek glass and steel sepulchres of Washington DC’s corporate lobbying firms. The genesis of this book took place somewhere less obvious: Seaburn metro station on the outskirts of Sunderland, on 21 June 2016.

Unlike the IEA and others, Soros’s Open Society Foundations publish extensive details of who they fund. openDemocracy’s website lists all of its funders, too. None of this money comes with any editorial control. Over the years, details of some of the IEA’s financial backers have been revealed. Tobacco manufacturers, the gambling and offshore financial services industries, and Big Oil have all donated.62 The think tank, which has published numerous books, papers and articles suggesting man-made climate change is disputed or exaggerated, has accepted funding from BP every year since 1967.63 Among the businesses that have funded the IEA is Tate & Lyle.64 The sugar giant is no stranger to lobbying.

See also https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/public-statement-on-nca-investigation-into-suspected-eu-referendum-offences; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 83 Charles Hymas, ‘Arron Banks threatens to sue Electoral Commission after being cleared by National Crime Agency over loans in Brexit referendum campaign’, Telegraph, September 2019. 84 Andrew Marr Show, BBC, November 2018. 85 Ian Cobain, ‘Ashcroft’s millions: from Belize tax haven to Tories via Southampton’, Guardian, March 2010. 86 Joe Lo, ‘Revealed: How Britain First Disguised the Source of a £200,000 Donation’, Vice, July 2019. 87 Billy Kenber, Paul Morgan-Bentley and Louis Goddard, ‘Tories under attack after tax haven donations’, The Times, March 2019. 88 Ian Cobain and Matthew Taylor, ‘Far-right terrorist Thomas Mair jailed for life for Jo Cox murder’, Guardian, November 2016. 89 ‘The Banks Files: Brexit funder urged campaign to “press it harder” after Jo Cox murder’, Channel 4, March 2019. 90 Rowena Mason, ‘Leave.EU condemned for linking Orlando attack to referendum vote’, Guardian, June 2016. 91 Ibid. 92 ‘Revealed: How Leave.EU faked migrant footage’, Channel 4, April 2019. 93 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Fake News’, House of Commons, June 2018.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Jansen and Kitajima Masamoto, March 19, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/place/Japan/The-Heian-period-794–1185; Amanda Foreman, “Tax Evasion’s Bite, from the Ancient World to Modern Days,” Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-evasions-bite-from-the-ancient-world-to-modern-days-1443028212. They proliferated after World War I: Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2011), 26–27; John Christensen, email to Jack Corrigan, July 10, 2020. about one-third of all international trade: Nick Shaxson, “Over a Third of World Trade Happens inside Multinational Corporations,” Tax Justice Network, April 9, 2019, https://www.taxjustice.net/2019/04/09/over-a-third-or-more-of-world-trade-happens-inside-multinational-corporations/.

Just as the aristocrats of Japan leveraged this power to acquire massive, tax-free estates, today’s elites use it to operate through an opaque, lightly regulated financial system that lets capital dart around the globe out of the reach of authorities. The jurisdictions that cater to the offshore world are known as tax havens. Tax havens as we know them emerged in the early 20th century. They proliferated after World War I as stashes for Europe’s wealth, then started to become a staple of the global economy in the 1960s and ’70s. They come in all shapes and sizes: tax havens can be countries (Ireland and Luxembourg), individual states (Delaware and South Dakota), or semi-sovereign territories (Bermuda and Hong Kong). They might specialize in certain areas: hedge funds like the Cayman Islands, insurance companies prefer Bermuda, Wall Street financiers gravitate to Delaware, and their European counterparts flock to Jersey, Ireland, and Luxembourg.

The reason Google and other multinational firms shuffle their money around the map in this way is to minimize their taxes, allowing them to generate billions of dollars from customers around the globe without giving a cut to the countries where they do business. Tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands, Bermuda, Luxembourg, and Ireland offer drastically reduced tax rates and regulations to lure in foreign businesses or wealthy individuals. Following a model set by Switzerland in the wake of World War I, most tax havens also promise secrecy, outlawing even officials from prying into the details of offshore accounts. HOW IT WORKS There are countless financial hoops that companies can jump through to ensure the money they make in one country appears in a tax haven. Corporations generally pay taxes only on profits.


pages: 769 words: 224,916

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, forensic accounting, global village, haute couture, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intangible asset, Iridium satellite, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, low earth orbit, margin call, Mount Scopus, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, urban planning, Yogi Berra

It did not require an advanced degree in political science to see that the Al-Saud was vulnerable to forces of Islamic revolution similar to those that had just toppled the shah of Iran across the Persian Gulf—and if the Saudi royal family fell, so would the Bin Ladens. The brothers moved quickly—and in secret—to create an offshore financial haven. On November 27, 1979, just one week after the Mecca uprising began, lawyers halfway around the world, in Panama City, filed a Notaría Primera del Circuito establishing a new company under Panamanian law: Binladin International Inc. They soon changed its name to the less conspicuous Binar, Inc.

Al-Qadi denied these accusations, too. He said that he had met Osama at religious gatherings in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s but that these meetings had been casual and inconsequential, and he adamantly denied providing any support to Al Qaeda or other terrorists at any time.26 Taken together, these offshore financial connections, while far from offering proof that some members of the Bin Laden family might have found ways to quietly pass funds to Osama after he had been forced to sell his family shareholdings, nonetheless offered fragments of intriguing evidence—strands that certainly demanded further and more rigorous investigation than the American government had yet managed to undertake, at least in the opinion of Michael Scheuer, the CIA’s lead analyst.

It was Ghalib who had visited Peshawar, Pakistan, during Ramadan in 1989, at a time when Osama was fighting in the battle for Jalalabad. There is evidence that Ghalib retained an interest in Islamic financial institutions at the time he agreed to accept Osama’s divested shares: in late 1993, Ghalib transferred $1 million to a new investment account at Bank Al-Taqwa, in the Bahamas, an offshore bank founded in 1988 with backing from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Taqwa funded HAMAS in Israel and other Brotherhood-influenced radical groups in Algeria and Tunisia, according to a written assessment by the U.S. Treasury Department. What involvement Bakr Bin Laden had in the Al-Taqwa investment is not known, but Bakr did have signature authority over Ghalib’s account, which remained active until at least the late 1990s, according to bank documents filed in a U.S. court.


pages: 382 words: 127,510

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

The Government charges five hundred dollars a year as a registration fee, and my friend takes another hundred or so: the Chief Minister went off to Hong Kong in 1984, looking for firms who are nervous about that colony’s reversion to China in 1997, and who might like to set up in Grand Turk. He was optimistic, though some of his colleagues wondered about their pride: the Turkmen and the Caiconians had been fishermen and salt rakers once, he said, and had liked hard work, and sweat; merely to sit back and earn fees from so dubious a business as offshore finance seemed, they said, a little ‘undignified’. There was something rather pleasant, an old fisherman said, ‘in being the least developed of the colonies. No one comes and bothers us here. That used to be the case, and now it’s changing. Once the bankers and the insurance men discover us, and the Americans, we’re done for.’

Billions of dollars’ worth pass through each year—cocaine from Bogota to Miami, heroin from Paris (via Haiti) to New York, marijuana from Caracas to Atlanta (via Nassau). Planes fly in and out of the South Caicos aerodrome at night; some are intercepted, most are untroubled. A very few islanders make a few dollars turning on the lights, or turning blind eyes; some of the offshore banks swell their accounts a little with drug commissions. But in general the big money stays away from the Turks and Caicos, and whatever their role in the distribution of the world’s drugs, the islanders remain generally poor. Chris Turner, the Governor, who lives in a wonderful mansion named Waterloo (it was built in the same year), and who drives a London taxi as his official car (its mirrors are gnawed off by the wild horses) can do little—either to clamp down on the drugs trade, or perk up the economy.

The shallow pans are brown with mud today, the low walls between them chipped and broken. A windmill that had once pumped the saline water from pound to pound had broken long ago, and its blades swayed uselessly back and forth, with a screech of rotten iron and a shower of rust. There were some new buildings, true: a determined effort was being made to turn the islands into a tax haven, and one lawyer I knew had noticeboards outside his office showing him to be the headquarters of some 4,200 companies, mostly American. The Government charges five hundred dollars a year as a registration fee, and my friend takes another hundred or so: the Chief Minister went off to Hong Kong in 1984, looking for firms who are nervous about that colony’s reversion to China in 1997, and who might like to set up in Grand Turk.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

When capitalism is global, how can the nation states scale alongside it? Is it possible that capitalism would prefer to fragment democracy through the application of nationalism? All the time the nation state is pinned back to its geographic remit, capitalism can effectively bypass it. This is illustrated in offshore finance and corporate tax avoidance. We also look at the other variations of capitalism that can be found around the world, in China, Japan and Germany. Finally, we ask how capitalism can survive if no one believes in it. Let’s start by analysing where economic success comes from. GEOGRAPHY, TRADE AND HUMAN RIGHTS First and foremost, Britain is economically successful because it is fantastically well connected.

No amount of legislation or compulsion will right wrongs without persistence, determination and goodwill. But it’s not just about the attitude of ordinary people. It matters at the top as well. THE PROBLEM WITH LEADERSHIP Since the turn of the century,2 we’ve learned that our leaders illegally avoided taxes,3 rigged interest rates,4 evaded taxes,5 laundered drug money,6 presided over an offshore banking system bigger than anyone thought possible,7 forced good companies into closure8 and destroyed pension funds as they themselves grew wealthier.9 Collectively, they oversaw an unprecedented destruction of wealth and the collapse of the financial system.10 They watched as life savings placed into investment funds set up by leaders of previously unimpeachable integrity turned out to be Ponzi schemes.11 They sold off reserves of gold to compensate for these exercises in corporate greed, while never once convicting any banker.12 Our spiritual leaders covered up sex abuse in the Church.13 Our charity leaders sexually abused the vulnerable.14 Our child welfare leaders have permitted child abuse.15 More CEOs are now being forced out of office for ethical lapse than for any other reason.16 Leaders of the automotive industry17 lied about emissions,18 were imprisoned, fled the country while out on bail and remain fugitives.19 The leaders of our water utilities polluted rivers then tried to cover it up.20 Global entertainment leaders have faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.21 Britain’s leading broadcaster falsely accused political figures of being child abusers,22 while allowing actual abusers to commit crimes on their premises.23 Meanwhile, sporting leaders have been caught cheating and doping.24 Human rights lawyers have been struck off for misconduct and dishonesty.25 In the US, many of the former president’s political advisors have been jailed26 and he has been subject to impeachment proceedings twice.

THE PROBLEM WITH LEADERSHIP Since the turn of the century,2 we’ve learned that our leaders illegally avoided taxes,3 rigged interest rates,4 evaded taxes,5 laundered drug money,6 presided over an offshore banking system bigger than anyone thought possible,7 forced good companies into closure8 and destroyed pension funds as they themselves grew wealthier.9 Collectively, they oversaw an unprecedented destruction of wealth and the collapse of the financial system.10 They watched as life savings placed into investment funds set up by leaders of previously unimpeachable integrity turned out to be Ponzi schemes.11 They sold off reserves of gold to compensate for these exercises in corporate greed, while never once convicting any banker.12 Our spiritual leaders covered up sex abuse in the Church.13 Our charity leaders sexually abused the vulnerable.14 Our child welfare leaders have permitted child abuse.15 More CEOs are now being forced out of office for ethical lapse than for any other reason.16 Leaders of the automotive industry17 lied about emissions,18 were imprisoned, fled the country while out on bail and remain fugitives.19 The leaders of our water utilities polluted rivers then tried to cover it up.20 Global entertainment leaders have faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.21 Britain’s leading broadcaster falsely accused political figures of being child abusers,22 while allowing actual abusers to commit crimes on their premises.23 Meanwhile, sporting leaders have been caught cheating and doping.24 Human rights lawyers have been struck off for misconduct and dishonesty.25 In the US, many of the former president’s political advisors have been jailed26 and he has been subject to impeachment proceedings twice. From the Mossack Fonseca and the Panama Papers27 revelations, it’s estimated28 that $8.7 trillion, or 11 per cent, of global wealth resides in tax havens.29 Large corporations are routinely shielding money, which deprived European governments alone of approximately $170 billion per annum in tax revenue.30 This offshore tax operation was surprising even to people who were aware of the problem. This was thought to be a fraction of the UK economy. It turned out to be a multiple of it.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

A recent estimate is around $11,500 billion, or around one third of all global wealth.9 Half of all global trade is now routed via offshore accounts to avoid tax. More money simply passes through the offshore centres on its way somewhere else. One American study WHY DID CHINA PAY FOR THE IRAQ WAR? 53 estimates that up to half of all global transactions are conducted electronically via the offshore financial centres. Inward investment into the UK or any EU member state has no need to route itself via tax havens, other than where it is trying to obtain an unfair tax or regulatory advantage, or where it wants to avoid disclosure of its provenance. Too much of the capital flowing through the offshore circuits is engaged in speculative activity rather than being committed to long-term investment.

Proposed levels at which to set the levy range enormously, from 0.1 per cent, considered by many to be high, through to a very modest suggestion from the group Stamp Out Poverty for a 0.005 per cent levy on sterling exchanges anywhere in the world, which would be difficult to avoid and would be collected in London wherever they took place.20 It would yield an estimated £2 billion a year and could be done without international agreement. Clamp down on offshore financial centres This is a way to insist that multinationals pay their fair share of the tax burden, as their smaller competitors have to. In fact, the UK is in an excellent position to make this happen, because many – if not most – of the more respectable tax havens in the world are also British crown dependencies. Since 2001, it has been far more difficult to hide money offshore, and the time has come to prevent corporations avoiding paying their fair share of tax.

Often the basic work is carried out by offshore packagers, who transform a pair of jeans made for big brand names for 20 US cents each (including wages) and sold in New York or London for $30, sewed by women and girls in Nicaragua working sometimes 20-hour shifts, sleeping in cramped breeze-block rooms.8 Then there are the taxes that benefit big over small, rich over poor. Poor people pay taxes when rich corporations increasingly don’t: among the big corporations that pay almost no tax worldwide is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Instead, the offshore financial centres, tiny pin-pricks on the atlas, like Jersey or the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands or Labuan in Malaysia – though Luxembourg, Switzerland and even offshore aspects of London, New York and Dublin ought to be included as well – now host a staggering amount of the world’s wealth. Of course, because of the secrecy that surrounds them – the Jersey authorities prefer the term ‘confidentiality’ – we can’t know how much.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

The yield on FDI assets has been persistently higher than that on the liabilities incurred to finance them, while financial services net export revenues – not to mention the related insurance, legal, accounting and other business service revenues – have reduced the UK’s current account deficit. Furthermore, UK-based financial flows with the tax havens, especially with the ‘UK offshore’ centres, are part of the mechanism for financing Britain’s balance of payments and for facilitating the flow of funds to other countries. Most writers on the offshore tax havens focus only on tax avoidance by the wealthy or by big companies, paying little attention to the relationships between the major powers. But the City’s relationships with the tax havens are another means by which it facilitates international flows of finance – for example, by channelling funds into the US via the Cayman Islands – in addition to the City being the location for a large share of the international banking, foreign exchange and derivatives deals in the global system.

The outstanding amounts result from a wide range of underlying flows of lending or depositing abroad, and from investments in foreign assets, borrowing via bond markets, and so forth. Table 8.6 Net external position of UK MFIs by location (end-year, $ bn)* 2000 2007 2013 2014 Total net position –119 –808 –517 –343 Of which Offshore financial centres –188 –526 –119 –101 Of which UK Offshore –138 –374 –247 –192 Cayman Islands –3 56 113 76 Developed countries – total 379 992 444 585 Of which Europe 258 467 155 150 US 82 413 73 245 Japan –6 –9 173 142 Developing countries – total –77 –247 –15 –42 Of which Europe 0 –40 59 56 Africa & Middle East –62 –181 –136 –107 Saudi Arabia –17 –79 –91 –71 Asia & Pacific –19 –33 34 –4 Latin America 7 7 28 13 Addenda for UK MFI liabilities International issue of securities –396 –396 –500 –469 Unallocated liabilities –167 –709 –435 –436 Note: *MFI means ‘monetary financial institution’ or bank.

So UK banks had net borrowings more or less equal to the output of the Turkish economy in a year! UK net bank borrowing later fell following the financial squeeze, but it was still $343bn at the end of 2014, close to the GDP of Denmark or South Africa. Within the total deficit, there is a continued net borrowing from developing countries and from offshore financial centres. The developing country total includes large net borrowing from Africa and the Middle East ($107bn at end-2014), especially from Saudi Arabia ($71bn). The latter depends both on Saudi oil revenues and on the continuing political and security links between the British state and the Saudi regime, which is why, to the bemusement of the blinkered British media, flags were flown at half-mast in Downing Street and at Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey on the death of Saudi King Abdullah in January 2015.


pages: 398 words: 105,917

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report, November 2003. 28. Lynnley Browning, ‘Defendants File a Flurry of Motions Challenging the KPMG Tax Shelter Case’, New York Times, 13 January 2006. 29. Nick Shaxson, ‘How Ireland Became an Offshore Financial Centre’, Tax Justice Network, 11 November 2015, http://www.taxjustice.net/2015/11/11/how-ireland-became-an-offshore-financial-centre/. 30. Fiona Reddan, ‘Scion of a Prominent Political Dynasty who Gave his Vote to Accountancy’, Irish Times, 8 May 2015. 31. O’Rourke’s role in Ireland’s tax avoidance activities was first exposed by Bloomberg reporter Jesse Drucker in a 28 October 2013 article, ‘Man Making Ireland Tax Avoidance Hub Proves Local Hero’. 32.

Expertise in the laws of a client’s home country and those of the world’s tax havens, with a permanent physical presence in each, enables their accountants to find just the right tax structure. The Big Four are particularly well qualified for the task because they help the tax havens frame their tax- and regulation-dodging laws in the first place. The Cayman Islands government’s private sector consultative committee, for example, includes representatives from every Big Four firm.40 As Nicholas Shaxson, author of the acclaimed tax haven exposé Treasure Islands told me: ‘The Big Four have done more than any other group to sustain the global system of offshore tax havens.’

Under arrangements sanctioned by KPMG, around $400m of the public company’s profits were stripped out between 1997 and 2003 into tax haven companies controlled by Black and his associates. These companies, claimed the Canadian press baron, owned his uniquely valuable management expertise and deserved the hundreds of millions of dollars they received. So-called ‘transfer pricing’ rules dictate that payments for goods or services by related companies should be at levels that would be agreed between independent parties operating at ‘arm’s length’ from each other. This is to prevent profits being artificially shifted into lower tax areas by, for example, overpaying fees to a tax haven company. Yet KPMG, doubling up as Hollinger’s tax adviser as well as auditor, chose to compare Hollinger’s fees ‘with the venture capital business because it was the one industry against which [its] fee structure would favorably compare’.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The CEO then posted a YouTube video indicating the stunt had a higher purpose—to advocate for “high quality ICO standards” and precisely to caution against such scams. Initial Coin Offerings Bulk Up Traditional financial centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with smaller offshore financial centers such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, have hosted a number of ICOs. According to one research outfit, about fifty-seven hundred ICOs had been completed by the end of 2020, raising roughly $28 billion. From 2017 onward, blockchain start-ups overall raised more money annually through ICOs than through venture capital financing.

Public corruption takes many forms and levels, ranging from the petty corruption of local officials to the massive high-level corruption involved in issuing lucrative business licenses and government procurement contracts. And no economy, no matter how rich or high-minded, is fully immune. Sophisticated quid pro quos and laundering of large bribes often involve complicated transactions with compliant bankers, clever lawyers and accountants, offshore bank accounts, and so forth; cash is usually not involved. Even so, cash has traditionally played a key role in facilitating corruption. India’s dramatic demonetization episode of November 2016, when high-denomination currency notes were invalidated overnight with no warning, was meant to be a strike against corruption.

The logic was that anyone with a large stock of currency notes beyond a certain limit had probably acquired those through nefarious means. Given how important cash was, and still is, to the Indian economy, this wrought economic havoc. And it probably hurt only unsophisticated corrupt officials and individuals, those who kept their ill-gotten gains in cash rather than in offshore bank accounts. Kenya’s demonetization in 2019—swapping out old high-denomination banknotes for new ones—at considerable expense and mainly as “a step in the fight against corruption,” likely had similar limited benefits. Undoubtedly, the connections between corruption and cash run deep, as reflected in the trope of briefcases or suitcases full of banknotes, usually US dollars, changing hands in return for illegal drugs, ammunition, or favors of various sorts.


pages: 562 words: 146,544

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Berlin Wall, Burning Man, call centre, digital map, disruptive innovation, double helix, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, high net worth, invisible hand, McMansion, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, RFID, satellite internet, SQL injection, Stewart Brand, tech worker, telemarketer, web application

The community of nations officially took a dim view of money-laundering centers with lax banking and incorporation laws and powerful privacy regulations—but then again, at some point every government had need of such things. The Daemon had directed Anderson to an informative Web page prior to her whirlwind tour of offshore tax havens, and it opened her eyes. Tax havens were tolerated—and in some cases facilitated—by powerful nations and global corporations. Intelligence agencies needed to wire untraceable money to informants or to fund operations in various troubled or soon-to-be-troubled regions. Corporations needed to incentivize key people without interference from investment groups and regulators.

Her specialty was neuromarketing research—examining the brain activity of people viewing various consumer products.” NSA: “You didn’t answer the question.” CIA: “Where does Sebeck come in?” FBI: “We’re not sure yet, but credit card records show Lanthrop staying at the same hotels where Sebeck attended law-enforcement seminars. They also traveled to Grand Cayman together. Lanthrop set up an offshore bank account there for a holding company that later held short positions in CyberStorm Entertainment stock. We have video of Lanthrop and Sebeck sitting at a bank manager’s desk. Sebeck’s wife had no knowledge of this trip.” NSA: “How do Sebeck and Lanthrop build an automated Hummer or an electrocution trap in the CyberStorm server farm?

For godsakes, Detective Sebeck had a safe deposit box in a Los Angeles bank where we found twenty thousand dollars in cash and a forged passport with his picture on it.” NSA: “That’s quite interesting.” He paused for effect. “I also find it interesting that there were several other Ventura County detectives besides Peter Sebeck who might have been assigned this case. And all of them had not one, but multiple offshore bank accounts. About which they claim ignorance.” This produced frowns around the table. CIA: “I don’t understand.” NSA motioned for a nearby aide to hit the lights. The room dimmed. NSA: “Look at this map.” He pulled out a remote and a map of the U.S. appeared, via PowerPoint, on a wall screen.


pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

In varying degrees, these countries are re-learning the old lesson of pre-1978 China, pre-1989 Soviet Union and pre-1991 India: that if a country does not trade and interact with the world, it is all but impossible to get ahead in the development game. This book also restricts itself to the developmental challenges facing what I would call ‘proper countries’. It ignores east Asia’s two main offshore financial centres – Hong Kong and Singapore. (A more accurate description of these two is port-offshore financial centres because of their dual role as shipping hubs.) The micro oil state of Brunei and east Asia’s traditional gambling centre, Macau, are also left out. As noted, much pointless and deeply misleading debate has been promoted over the years by comparing the development of, say, Hong Kong with that of China, or that of Singapore with Indonesia’s.

The British Empire’s treasury understood the logic of offshore centres and consistently argued the case for them in preference to larger colonies, which were favoured by aggrandising politicians and entrepreneurs who wanted government to subsidise their activities by paying for infrastructure and the like. Today’s offshore financial industry is rooted in the string of little islands that were beloved of the accountants of an economically predatory empire. (Not all the small islands of the British Empire have remained as offshore financial centres. Bombay and Lagos were originally settled by the British because they were islands. In south-east Asia, Penang gave way as the original offshore centre to Singapore.) Among major studies of development economics, Ha-Joon Chang’s The East Asian Development Experience: The Miracle, the Crisis and the Future (London: Zed Books, 2007), p. 18, Alice H.

This tends to pit the state against many businessmen, and also against consumers, who have shorter strategic horizons. The policy prescription for rapid economic development was confused for a time in east Asia by the presence of other fast-growing economies that did not conform to the pattern of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the World Bank seized on the performance of the offshore financial centres of Hong Kong and Singapore, and the suddenly faster-growing south-east Asian economies of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, to argue that economic development was in fact fostered by laissez-faire policies, with a minimal role for government. Despite the fact that the offshore centres, with their tiny, dense populations and absence of agricultural sectors to drag on productivity, are not really comparable to regular countries, the World Bank used Hong Kong and Singapore as two of its three ‘proving’ case studies in a highly controversial 1987 report.1 After widespread academic criticism of the report, the World Bank followed up with another one in 1993, The East Asian Miracle, which admitted the existence of industrial policy and infant industry protection in some states.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

To back up their arguments, Alsayyad and Roy deploy a wide range of examples: affluent gated communities, regulated squatter settlements, a proliferating range of incarceration facilities and torture-camp cities where ‘violence is constantly deployed in the name of peace and order’.201 They also mention the insurgent urban governance which is emerging in places like Hezbollah-controlled towns in Lebanon, Hamas-controlled Gaza, and other ‘neighbourhood-level Islamic republics being declared by religious fundamentalist groups’.202 To this list one could add the proliferation of camp-like security architectures which sustain global financial cores, export-processing zones, tourist enclaves, offshore finance enclosures, logistics hubs, ports, airport cities, research complexes and ‘technopoles’, as well as the temporary urban militarizations imposed for mega sports events and political summits. All their examples, argue Alsayyad and Roy, involve ‘private systems of governance that operate as medieval fiefdoms, imposing truths and norms that are often contrary to national law’.203 As in medieval times, the result is the emergence of the modern city as what Holston and Appadurai have called a ‘honeycomb of jurisdictions’, a ‘medieval body [of] overlapping, heterogeneous, non-uniform, and increasingly private memberships’.204 Permeating all of this are the biometric technologies, mobilized to track, to identify and to control access.

Hard-edged urban enclaves, notable among the ‘spatial products’ of transnational neoliberalism, are difficult to miss nowadays. Foreign-trade and export-processing zones, established to entice corporations to use cheap, disciplined local labour for their manufacturing and logistics functions, increasingly operate as quasi-autonomous realms, bordered off from their host cities and nations.51 Offshore financial enclaves, as well as the hypergentrified cores of key global cities such as London, present themselves as utopias for the super-rich. Enclaves of ‘garrison tourism’ emerge, surrounded by the razor-wire fences more typical of military bases, especially when located in developing nations dominated by mass immiseration, such as Haiti.52 Projected giant cruise ships, such as the ‘Freedom Ship’, are marketed as veritable sea-borne cities.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

But in recent times the United States has proven to be one of the most significant financial havens in the entire world. David Wilson, a partner in a Swiss law firm, stated: “America is the new Switzerland.” Hard data are difficult to come by because of the very nature of this enterprise, but possibly the United States is the world’s largest offshore financial center.19 Without much explicit debate or discussion, American laws evolved to produce an especially high degree of secrecy for some asset holdings in this country. In particular, state governments are often allowed to do what the federal government will not do—in this case, augment provisions for asset secrecy.

Do you remember when in 2017 the ruling prince of Saudi Arabia locked Saudi millionaires and billionaires in the Ritz-Carlton and demanded billions of their wealth, refusing to release them until they had paid up? Whichever side of the Saudi dispute you might be on, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to learn that Saudis are major users of confidential offshore financial institutions. America’s status as a tax, bank, and trust haven is definitely good for the United States, and from a broader point of view it might be good for the rest of the globe too. That would be yet another benefit of the American financial system, although we don’t know the entire net calculus on this one.

In other words, that is about 2 percent of GDP each year as a kind of international free lunch—in absolute terms, about $334 billion a year. That is a pretty big gain to reap from the U.S. financial sector. In essence, you can think of America as the world’s largest and most successful hedge fund. That involves some risks, but it has made us a much wealthier nation.18 AMERICA AS TAX HAVEN AND BANKING HAVEN Americans typically think of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, or maybe Monaco or Andorra as the tax and banking havens of our time. Those with Asian connections will know about Singapore and Hong Kong in this capacity, or maybe Chinese private banking. But in recent times the United States has proven to be one of the most significant financial havens in the entire world.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

A recent study puts the global extent of international profit shifting at more than 5 percent of total corporate profits, or about $620 billion.14 Estimates of tax losses due to profit shifting vary between 4 percent and 10 percent of corporate income tax revenues for the advanced OECD industrial economies.15 A recent simulation study finds corporate tax losses of 7.7 percent of total corporate tax revenues in the EU.16 Investigations reported in the “Panama Papers” and “Paradise Papers” uncovered the extent of this tax evasion and avoidance. As a result, the G-20 put increased pressure on the offshore financial centers to increase their transparency, and to participate in systems of automatic exchange of tax information. Unfortunately, some of the most important secrecy havens are not offshore, in places like Panama and the Cayman Islands, but onshore, in countries such as the United States and the UK.

# The reason is that increased imports destroy jobs as exports increase them, and the imports destroyed are more labor-intensive than the exports created; if Europe maintains (roughly) trade balance, then net, jobs are destroyed. ** As we noted in Chapter 6, though we often think of these as “offshore financial centers,” some jurisdictions in the United States (Nevada, Delaware) and the City of London have also profited from these nefarious activities. †† According to a 2015 report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, around 60 percent of completed ISDS cases favored investors while only 40 percent favored governments. ‡‡ While similar provisions existed in some 1,400 bilateral investment treaties, the new agreements mark the first time these provisions fall under an EU-level trade deal with application to all economic sectors.

This kind of tax avoidance and tax evasion†† is, of course, a global phenomenon, and it moved toward the top of the international community’s agenda after the 2008 crisis revealed an acute need for government revenue. During this time, countries realized that they were losing massive amounts of money from evasion and avoidance through tax havens and profit shifting. A recent study puts the global extent of international profit shifting at more than 5 percent of total corporate profits, or about $620 billion.14 Estimates of tax losses due to profit shifting vary between 4 percent and 10 percent of corporate income tax revenues for the advanced OECD industrial economies.15 A recent simulation study finds corporate tax losses of 7.7 percent of total corporate tax revenues in the EU.16 Investigations reported in the “Panama Papers” and “Paradise Papers” uncovered the extent of this tax evasion and avoidance.


pages: 294 words: 89,406

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

Completely fake assets Although it is more usual for the accounting faker to take an existing asset and overvalue it, it is by no means unknown to create a complete fiction. Gowex’s network of European municipal WiFi hot spots would be one example, although the biggest fake asset frauds tend to involve offshore bank accounts. There are legitimate reasons* why a company might want to have a lot of cash sitting in an offshore account – it might be the proceeds of a large asset sale which need to be reinvested, or be money raised through a loan or bond issue from an offshore bank. But offshore accounts by their nature tend not to be very transparent, and it occasionally happens that the account gets emptied by an embezzler, or that the ownership of the account turns out to belong to a corporate entity other than the one that is reporting it in its accounts.

You can also (this is called a ‘countertrading’ fraud), send another packet of SIM cards round the system in the other direction, so that some of the stages in the middle have no net liability to report and therefore no automatic reports to the taxman are made. And it helps for everyone to have bank accounts with an offshore bank that isn’t very reliable in responding to inquiries from the tax authorities. In other words, all of the obfuscatory arsenal of the fraudster is available to conceal the bad intentions of the party who is planning to carry out a classic long firm fraud against the government – to build up a big trading debt and then not pay it.

And the gradual decolonisation of places like the Dutch Antilles and the Cayman Islands left many small countries with few natural economic advantages other than a set of tax treaties and a legal structure familiar to First World bankers. It was only in 2003 that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development made it any sort of priority at all to do something about tax havens. Over the following years, the US authorities had got tougher and tougher on tax crime (in particular, Swiss-regulated bankers like Birkenfeld were absolutely not meant to be touting for business in the USA, and they were instructed to tell immigration authorities that they were only on pleasure trips).


pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

Her publications include Financial Alchemy in Crisis: The Great Liquidity Illusion (2010) and Shadow Banking Scope, Origins Theories (2017). She is based in London. UDI SALMANOVICH RONEN PALAN is an Israeli-born economist and professor of international political economy at City, University of London. His work focuses on offshore financial centers and tax havens. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including The Imagined Economies of Globalisation (with Angus Cameron, Sage, 2004) and Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (with Richard Murphy and Christian Chavagneux, Cornell University Press, 2010). He is based in London. BIBLIOGRAPHY Amadeo, K., ‘Bearn Stearns, Its Collapse, and Bailout’, The Balance, 8 October 2018 (updated), www.thebalance.com/bearn-stearns-collapse-and-bailout-3305613.

., ‘Banks pay lowest proportion of tax since before financial crisis’, Financial Times, 4 December 2015, www.ft.com/content/1414b394-99dc-11e5-987b-d6cdef1b205c). 31. M. Aubrey, and T. Dauphin, ‘Opening the Vaults: The Use of Tax Havens by Europe’s Biggest Banks.’ Oxfam, 2017. 32. Jessica Fino, ‘UK Banks Make £9bn in Profits in Tax Havens’, Economia, 27 March 2017, https://economia.icaew.com/news/march-2017/uk-banks-hold-9bn-in-profits-in-tax-havens. Chapter 14. So What? 1. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, ‘The Pecora Report: The 1934 Report on the Practices of Stock Exchanges from the Pecora Commission’, US Senate, Report No. 1455, June 2009 [1934], p. 31, www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/…/pdf/Pecora_FinalReport.pdf.

Together with Goldman Sachs and UBS, which did pay some corporate tax in the UK that year, the seven banks employed 33,000 staff in the UK, reported revenues of £20bn in the UK and profits of £3.5bn, but ended up paying a combined total of £21m in corporation tax.30 Meanwhile, the twenty biggest European banks posted profits of at least £18bn in global tax havens in 2016.31 Collectively, these institutions made €4.9bn (£4.2bn) in profits in Luxembourg, more than they made in the UK, Sweden and Germany combined. Country-by-country data suggests that European banks did not pay a single euro in tax on €383m in profits made in tax havens in 2015.32 Like many crises before it, the global financial meltdown has been an educating experience. For instance, we know more today about how a bank may be ‘wound down’, or how many derivatives are traded on organized platforms, or what securitization entails.


Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

In the blink of an eye, the islands, which had previously lacked electricity, acquired satellite TV. The Turks and Caicos relied upon the exportation of salt, which remained the backbone of the British colony until 1964. Today finance, tourism and fishing generate most of the income, but the islands could not survive without British aid. The tax-free offshore finance industry is a mere minnow compared with that of the Bahamas, and many would be astonished to discover that Grand Turk, the much-hyped financial center, is really just a dusty backwater in the sun. Illegal drug trafficking, a major problem in the 1980s, has also been a source of significant revenue for a few islanders.

Illegal drug trafficking, a major problem in the 1980s, has also been a source of significant revenue for a few islanders. Relations between islanders and Britishappointed governors have been strained since 1996, when the incumbent governor's comments suggesting that government and police corruption had turned the islands into a haven for drug trafficking appeared in the Offshore Finance Annual, and opponents accused him of harming investment. Growing opposition threatened to spill over into civil unrest. Things were made far worse in 2009, when the Governor of the Turks and Caicos imposed direct rule on the country following a series of corruption scandals that rocked the islands in 2008.

From the 17th-century pirates who blew their doubloons on women and wine to the dashing blockade runners who smuggled cargo from the Confederacy during the American Civil War, the city has a history of accommodating the young and the reckless. The trend continues today, with bankers dodging between downtown’s international banks as they manipulate millions on this offshore banking haven. But Nassau’s not just for those wanting to earn or burn a quick buck. Banished royalty and camera-fleeing celebs have found refuge in Nassau too, with the disgraced Duke and Duchess of Windsor keeping tongues wagging in the 1940s and the ultimately tragic Anna Nicole Smith hiding out here in 2006.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

As James Bennet, technology editor of Strategic Investment, has written: Enforcement of laws and particularly tax codes has become heavily dependent on surveillance of communications and transactions. Once the next logical steps have been taken, and offshore banking locations offer the services of communication in hard RSA-encrypted electronic mail using account numbers derived from public-key systems, financial transactions will be almost impossible to monitor at the bank or in communications. Even if the tax authorities were to plant a mole in the offshore bank, or burglarize the bank records, they would not be able to identify depositors.' 2 To a degree that has never before been possible, individuals will be able to determine where to domicile their economic activities and how much income tax they prefer to pay.

In cyberspace. the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish. In cyberspace, the meek and the mighty will meet on equal terms. Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds. When this greatest tax haven of them all is fully open for business, all funds will essentially be offshore funds at the discretion of their owner. This will have cascading consequences. The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.

Appeals from Andorran civil suits were traditionally lodged either with the Episcopal College of Urgel or the Court of Cassation in Paris. A consequence of Andorra's ambiguous position was that almost no laws were enacted. Andorra has enjoyed vanishingly small government and no taxes for more than seven hundred years. Today, that gives it a growing appeal as a tax haven. But until a generation ago, Andorra was famously poor. Once thickly wooded, it was deforested over the centuries by residents trying to stay warm in the bitter winters. The whole place is snowed shut from November through April each year. Even in summer, Andorra is so cold that crops grow only on the southern slopes.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

., “ABS Inflows to the United States and the Global Financial Crisis.” 17. T. Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (London: Verso, 2017); D. Kynaston, City of London: The History, vol. 4 (London: Penguin, 2002); and N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012). 18. E. Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 19. J. Green, “Anglo-American Development, the Euromarkets, and the Deeper Origins of Neoliberal Deregulation,” Review of International Studies 42 (2016), 425–449. 20.

Russia could thus seem the very model of a national economic powerhouse, with a huge trade surplus, surging foreign reserves and a strong state. But the paradox of Russia’s position was that its new prosperity was associated not with independence from the world economy but with entanglement with it.30 And this entanglement extended beyond the export of oil and gas. Money was even more liquid and the pipelines connecting the offshore banking system were ready laid. Tens of billions of dollars in oil and gas export earnings never returned to Russia. Russia’s oligarchs behaved like the masters of a 1970s petrostate, harboring their wealth in offshore havens like Cyprus, from where it cycled back to London and its convenient eurodollar accounts.

Two years later the eurozone crisis was still menacing global financial stability. I Viewed against the wider canvas of the global crisis stretching from Wall Street to Seoul, the troubles of Greece and Ireland were not unusual and we do not need to refer to idiosyncratic features of eurozone governance to explain them.1 Ireland was an overgrown offshore banking hub. The costs of the bailout that Dublin saddled itself with were enough to have put even the most fiscally sound state in danger. It was Lagarde’s nightmare of October 2008 made real: a crisis in Europe’s highly integrated financial system too big for a host country to resolve alone. The politicians in Dublin were driven by panic and their intimate ties to the local banking community, but Merkel’s veto on any collective European solution made Ireland’s situation untenable.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

Dubai may be a huge, undemocratic money-laundering center in the Middle East, but the country embraces free trade and globalization; it is stable in a region renowned for violence; it has not relied on oil for its wealth but invented itself as a novel force in the Arab world. Furthermore, as long as the United States and Europe permit the existence of offshore banking centers, they remain guilty of hypocrisy. For organized crime, these are equally important instruments, offering a variety of additional services such as flags of convenience, shell companies to disguise illegal activities, and freedom from prying tax authorities. The only credible reason for their growth and success is the fact that many corporations in the licit economy use them for exactly the same reasons (especially tax evasion).

“You could do it quite easily,” said a senior NSC official involved in the hunt for drugs and thugs during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. “You go to Lichtenstein, which is one of these places, and you just put a gun to its head and say, ‘If you don’t put an end to these practices, we’re going pull the trigger.’ I suggested this under Clinton, but unfortunately the idea was turned down.” Without offshore banks it would not be only the mobsters finding it onerous to shuffle their money and companies around. Enron would have found it a lot harder too. The issue of money laundering will continue to haunt Dubai as it strives to represent itself as a model of transparency. But there is an even higher cost that the city has had to pay for its success—a human cost.

This last admission reinforces the urgent need for greater regulation in the financial markets: in a world where legitimate institutions are unable to account properly for their dealings, the ability of criminals to launder their money through this merry-go-round of speculation is greatly increased. The Caymans, British Virgin Islands, and all the other offshore banking centers are the back door through which criminal money can enter into the legitimate, if increasingly opaque, money markets. Western governments could close this anomaly overnight if they took decisive action, making money laundering a significantly trickier prospect. But they don’t. And the deeper the involvement of shadow funds with the licit money markets, the harder it becomes to follow the cash that is the key to the successful policing of international organized crime.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

The UK boasts an unrivalled tax avoidance industry with an abundance of highly paid accountants able to devise labyrinthine ways of hiding wealth. The country is increasingly seen as one where large corporations and rich individuals can legally treat tax as a largely optional obligation. In 2007 the International Monetary Fund ranked London alongside Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands as ‘an offshore financial centre’. While Britain has maintained only loose controls over the City, New York was forced to respond to a series of high-profile financial and business scandals, from Enron to WorldCom, by passing the controversial Sarbanes Oxley Act in 2002. This imposed much tougher corporate tests on the disclosure of information, on accountancy procedures and on the process of listing on the New York Stock Exchange, making New York less attractive to the world’s business rich and contributing to London’s eventual seizure of the global crown.

For the first time since the tax system had been restructured after the War, the tax burden fell more heavily on lower than higher income groups. Labour did nothing to reverse this trend.138 The gaping loopholes that enabled the very rich to pay proportionally less tax than low earners were mostly ignored and tax havens were left largely untouched. In return for this favoured treatment, the government believed Britain would benefit in two ways. First, the City would ensure that the increasingly finance-dependent economy would flourish under its watch. Second, as the economy boomed, the government would rake in money to spend on public services.

Other sources suggest that around $300 billion of assets in the West belong to Russian citizens. 163 Capital flight is not unique to Russia. Lured by the prospect of much higher returns, money has poured across borders, much of it coming from the world’s poorest countries. Since the 1970s, the number of offshore tax havens has more than doubled to over sixty while offshore companies are now numbered in the millions.164. The capital of the Cayman Islands, George Town, is the world’s fifth largest banking centre, with nearly 600 banks and trust companies, though only fifty have a physical presence and just thirty-one are authorised to trade with the local residents.165 The country has a population of 35,000 but it is home to some 48,000 corporations and trusts.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Washington DC, November 14 20 Rogoff (2015) 21 Gordon, B. (2015) “The Turtle’s Progress: Secular Stagnation Meets the Headwinds”, in Baldwin and Teulings (2015) 22 Baldwin and Teulings (2015) 23 Milanovic, B. (2015) “Bob Solow on Rents and Decoupling of Productivity and Wages”, globalinequality, 2 May. https://glineq.blogspot.com/2015/05/bob-solow-on-rents-and-decoupling-of.html 24 This account draws on: Marx (1867); Mandel (1976); Harvey (2018) 25 This account draws on: Duménil and Lévy (2004; 2005); Palley (2007); Hein (2012). 26 This account draws on: Lapavitsas (2013); Stockhammer (2004); Aglietta and Breton (2001); Clark (2009); Foster (2010); Hein (2012); Dutt (2005); Palley (2007). 27 This account draws on: Lapavitsas (2013); Panitch and Gindin (2012); Blakeley (2018a); Norfield, T. (2016) The City: London and the Power of Global Finance, London: Verso; Amin, S. (2018) Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value: Monopoly Capital and Marx’s Law of Value, USA: Monthly Review Press 28 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2008) Trade and Development Report 2008: Commodity Prices, Capital Flows and the Financing of Investment. 29 Shaxson (2012); Garcia-Barnardo, J., Fichtner, J., Takes, F. and Heemskerk, E. (2017) “Uncovering Offshore Financial Centers: Conduits and Sinks in the Global Corporate Ownership Network”, Scientific Reports, vol. 7 30 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Uneca) (2012) “Illicit Financial Flows REPORT OF THE HIGH LEVEL PANEL ON ILLICIT FINANCIAL FLOWS FROM AFRICA”, Uneca. 31 See, e.g., Krugman, P. (2015) “The Case for Cuts Was a Lie.

By providing capital gains to a large swathe of the population, the Conservatives would be creating a class of people who had a material interest in the economy remaining as it was, even if most of the gains from growth were going to the top 1%. Blowing Bubbles In October 2018, the record for the most expensive UK home was broken when the penthouse at One Hyde Park was sold for £160m.34 Initially, the identity of the buyer was shrouded in mystery. The property had been purchased through a shell corporation located in the tax haven of Guernsey, where companies aren’t required to disclose their beneficial owners. But a few days later the buyer’s identity was revealed. As it turns out, the developer, multi-millionaire property tycoon Nick Candy, sold the penthouse to himself via Project Grande (Guernsey) Limited — a joint venture between his brother Christian Candy and the former Prime Minister of Qatar — so he could release the equity with a £80m loan from Credit Suisse.

At the same time, financialisation has allowed Anglo-America to play an extractive neo-colonial role in the international system, to the detriment of workers in the global North and the rest of the world.27 Forced to open up their markets to international investment in the 1970s and 1980s, many states in the global South have seen capital flee their domestic economies in search of higher returns in the booming asset markets in the US and the UK.28 This has left these states starved of domestic capital and relying on foreign domestic investment, leaving them stuck in a position of permanent dependence and underdevelopment. A significant chunk of the capital flight out of the global South took the form of illicit financial flows into tax havens, often with the City of London acting as a key conduit.29 The global South lost more than $1trn in illicit financial outflows in 2012, with the majority coming from Africa.30 But the Anglo-American economies have also suffered from the imbalances this situation has brought about. Capital flows pushed up the value of their exchange rates, suppressing domestic demand by reducing the value of the last item in Keynes’ equation: net exports.


Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

These offshore dollar deposits issued by banks of European origin came to be called Eurodollars (the word Eurodollar has no relation whatsoever to the euro currency, which didn’t exist until 2001). International banks had discovered a way, without asking anybody’s permission, to create dollars away from the purview of the Federal Reserve. These international banks (offshore banks) were outside the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore didn’t have to adhere to any of the gold-coverage and reserve ratios set forth by the Fed and U.S. government. Another idiosyncratic demand existed for Eurodollars: financial privacy from the United States. The 1950s were defined by the beginnings of a Cold War between capitalism and communism.

On December 12, 2007, the Federal Reserve was finally forced to address the gargantuan elephant in the room, which was that European interbank trust and the “bookkeeper’s pen” Eurodollar funding mechanisms had broken down. A contraction in European interbank trust, expressed by a rising LIBOR, was causing the whole dollar pyramid to rattle like an earthquake. The Fed instituted foreign exchange swap lines to the European Central Bank and Swiss National Bank in order to provide liquidity to the offshore banking system, having to turn a blind eye to the practice of creating dollar liabilities outside the Fed’s purview. The Fed’s role as lender of last resort had expanded beyond its borders because of the complicated evolution of the international monetary system, not because its mandate all of a sudden switched from domestic to global monetary policy.


pages: 475 words: 155,554

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

The full reality would only be revealed if the UK published its own version of the TIC data. Although the chancellor has often told us that Britain owes a portion of its debts to China, a figure has never been published. Why? In the realms of international financial diplomacy, fingers point towards the UK’s ‘appallingly bad’ data on financial flows, more suited to a secretive offshore financial centre than the world’s capital of finance. London’s wish to protect its role as manager of Gulf oil money and as a conduit for China’s surplus dollars might explain why. A portion of China’s purchases of US government bonds were originally scored as ‘UK’ purchases. ‘More attention is needed in the USA to flows through UK banks,’ Setser told me.

But it was not willing to bail out Cyprus itself. At best, there was a staggering inequity in the treatment of Cypriot and Greek banks. At worst, the EU specifically intervened to protect Greece, and to export part of its own dodgy loan default over the sea to Cyprus. As a by-product, Cyprus was destroyed as an offshore financial centre. Certainly at the height of fevered negotiations, the issue of the treatment of the Greek units was at the very top of the concerns being expressed from Brussels about laws being passed in Nicosia. Bank queues could be tolerated in Nicosia. But not in Athens. On the middle Monday of that nightmare Lent, there was a planned bank holiday in Cyprus, to celebrate Greek Independence Day.

But for the mortgage securitisation team at one British bank, it was a waking nightmare. They had to get his package to London before the close of business. This was how banking from the shadows actually worked on the ground. The business of this particular banking team was built on transferring mortgages that they had written off their balance sheet into offshore trusts based in tax havens. But the transfer of the mortgage, and the cash, had to be made the same day, in one go. Ordinarily this could be done electronically. The ‘pain in the arse’, as far as the team was concerned, was the insistence in Scottish law on ‘declaration of trust’. In essence this meant that physical signatures were required on the first and last pages of a printout that included all the names and addresses of those whose mortgages were to be transferred.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

‘If there is an opportunity for some oil, they call us, taking into account this joint venture we have,’ Vicente told me.42 Isaías Samakuva, the leader of the Angolan opposition political party into which Unita has evolved since its defeat in the civil war, told me that China Sonangol was ‘the key to all the support that is given to Mr dos Santos, to his rule’ but that understanding how the Futungo drew wealth and power from the company was impossible because ‘everything is in the dark’.43 Not quite everything is in the dark. Corporate filings in Hong Kong and elsewhere reveal glimpses of the Queensway Group’s corporate labyrinth. But, as in Dan Gertler’s deals in Congo, many of the trails vanish behind the thick walls of offshore finance. For example, Manuel Vicente and other senior Angolan officials have been named in company filings alongside founding members of the Queensway Group as directors of a company called Worldpro Development Limited. Its registration documents in Hong Kong give no indication of the company’s purpose and state that it is wholly owned by World Noble Holdings Limited, which is registered in the British Virgin Islands, a Caribbean archipelago where companies can keep their owners secret.

In three British Crown dependencies – the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean and Bermuda in the North Atlantic – as well as the Marshall Islands, an outpost in the Pacific partly controlled by the United States, the figure exceeded 100 per cent. Bermuda topped the chart with a profit-to-GDP ratio of 647.7 per cent. At this point the notion that multinationals that use tax havens apportion profits fairly becomes absurd: the total profits declared by American companies were several times the size of each tax haven’s entire economy. The United States alone is losing as much as $60 billion a year to tax dodges based on income shifting, according to estimates Gravelle cited – and the United States probably has the most advanced system to enforce payment and hunt down tax evaders.

‘I am extremely worried about a political system where the voters are starving and the politicians buy votes with money from natural resource companies,’ Kamitatu said. ‘Is that democracy?’ Dan Gertler’s Congolese mining deals have made him a billionaire. Many of the transactions in which he has played a part are fiendishly complicated, involving multiple interlinked sales conducted through offshore vehicles registered in tax havens where all but the most basic company information is secret. Nonetheless, a pattern emerges. A copper or cobalt mine owned by the Congolese state or rights to a virgin deposit are sold, sometimes in complete secrecy, to a company controlled by or linked to Gertler’s offshore network for a price far below what it is worth.


pages: 372 words: 109,536

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money by Frederik Obermaier

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

He argued that ‘giving an anonymous person a suitcase of money’ for the data was ‘completely unthinkable’. But that is precisely what the head of the tax authority decided to do. The data was bought for the equivalent of around €200,000. And in a TV interview on the subject, asked whether he had held assets in tax havens or conducted transactions via tax havens at any time, the finance minister declared: ‘No, I have never held assets in a tax haven or anything like that.’ When we go through this case with Jóhannes in Reykjavik, he points to his laptop: ‘I’ve got the sentence on there, and I am going to have it scrolling right across the screen when we publish the story.’ On that night in October when Jóhannes sat drinking coffee after coffee while trawling through the cache of data that was finally fully searchable, Bjarni Benediktsson was one of the first names he entered.

It would be extremely interesting to see how many offshore companies would remain in business if the names of their owners were made public. It is simply a matter of systematically implementing these two measures. We hear again and again from the defenders of tax havens (mostly they cite something they call ‘tax competition’) that these reforms could never be implemented in practice. Certainly, this raises the question: why should the tax havens give in? In fact the French author Gabriel Zucman, in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, has worked through how the automatic exchange of information and the register of real owners could be implemented, using sanctions and enforcement if necessary.

The site was taken down a few weeks after it was criticized in the Offshore Secrets reports by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, but we can still find archived screenshots.10 These tell us that the offices in Jersey and Guernsey were opened back in 1972, the Deutsche Bank office in the Cayman Islands in 1983 and the Mauritius office in 1999. For a while, the site even bore the proud claim: ‘Committed to offshore financial services for over 30 years.’ The client services that Deutsche Bank committed to provide were certainly not always illegal. But in some cases they were. While we were conducting our research, in November 2015, Deutsche Bank Switzerland, for example, had to pay $31 million in fines to the US authorities because between 2008 at the latest and 2013 it helped US citizens to circumvent their tax obligations.


pages: 605 words: 110,673

Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt

British Empire, double helix, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, offshore financial centre, precautionary principle, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), War on Poverty

Disrupting retailer activity in the UK occupies a lot of police and court time, but doesn’t stop people who want drugs getting their hands on them. The final sort of supply-side interventions focus on money-laundering, but the Strategy Unit acknowledged that this is even harder to disrupt as it’s shrouded in the secrecy of the offshore banking system. The report concluded that, “despite interventions at every point in the supply chain, cocaine and heroin consumption has been rising, prices falling and drugs have continued to reach users.” The drugs trade is not being harmed in any substantial way, and the drugs trade views government interventions simply as a cost of business rather than a threat to its viability.

A number of different techniques are used, such as small-scale electronic transfers and false invoicing: it’s been estimated that 24in Panama there is a £1 billion gap every year between money entering and goods exported, with the difference plugged with the proceeds of various sorts of crime, primarily drug trafficking. 25Banks, in turn, are complicit in this process, failing to report or record suspicious activity, because some are controlled by criminal organisations, and perhaps also because offshore banking services depend on secrecy for tax evasion and avoidance. Exposing the activities of drug traffickers would expose the activities of other clients. Making it easier for large volumes of money to travel the world without any kind of accountability undermines governments and is dangerous for the financial system as a whole.

Increasing instability and unaccountability in financial systems The illicit drugs trade is the second largest in the world, second only to oil. The money involved – perhaps 23£300 billion a year – is about 1% of the global economy, and operates almost entirely under the radar, untaxed and unregulated. Drugs money is laundered through front companies and tax havens, and then integrated back into the mainstream banking system so that criminal organisations can have access to “legitimate funds”. A number of different techniques are used, such as small-scale electronic transfers and false invoicing: it’s been estimated that 24in Panama there is a £1 billion gap every year between money entering and goods exported, with the difference plugged with the proceeds of various sorts of crime, primarily drug trafficking. 25Banks, in turn, are complicit in this process, failing to report or record suspicious activity, because some are controlled by criminal organisations, and perhaps also because offshore banking services depend on secrecy for tax evasion and avoidance.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

The South African firm requests that the British firm send the invoice for $1 million to a tax haven. The tax haven then rein-voices the South African firm at more than the agreed value of the goods – say $1.5 million. The South African firm pays the $1.5 million to the tax haven. The tax haven then pays $1 million to the British firm and diverts the rest to an offshore account. As far as the tax authorities in South Africa can tell, the transaction appears legitimate – but the South African firm has successfully spirited $500,000 into an offshore account where it will never be taxed. While this practice amounts to a serious crime, tax havens nonetheless openly advertise their reinvoicing services and offer to assist firms in setting up shell companies to launder money and evade taxes.

It is impossible to know how much money is stashed in the world’s tax havens, but a lowball estimate in 2010 suggested the figure was at least $21 trillion, and probably closer to $32 trillion – about $9 trillion of which is from poor countries. The money stashed away in tax havens amounts to more than one-sixth of all the world’s private wealth. Today, at least 30 per cent of all foreign direct investment flows through tax havens, and about 50 per cent of all trade.23 There are three main categories of tax havens.24 There are tax havens in Europe, like Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands, which are probably the best known, as well as Belgium, Austria, Monaco and Lichtenstein.

This is why mispricing has grown at such a rapid rate since the mid-1990s. Still, none of this theft would be possible without the tax havens. Altogether, there are around fifty to sixty tax havens in the world. They function as tax havens not only because they offer low or zero tax rates, but because they have very little financial regulation and, most importantly, they shroud financial information behind a veil of secrecy. Indeed, the technical term for a tax haven is secrecy jurisdiction. In most cases, banks and corporations operating out of secrecy jurisdictions are not required to disclose anything about where money comes from and where it goes – and in some cases it is actually illegal to disclose such information.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

Liberalization provided banks scope to engage in additional risky activities, including aggressive interest-rate competition, offshore banking, and U.S.-dollar operations. While interestrate competition was a presumable objective of financial liberalization, absence of effective supervision meant banks could undertake riskier operations than they could safely manage. Managers of more conservative banks found themselves having to engage in risky activities in response to competition. Offshore banking turned out to be a source of instability. Banks ran their offshore funding operations pretty much as if they were onshore, taking deposits and doing other business in branches within Ecuador.

Banks ran their offshore funding operations pretty much as if they were onshore, taking deposits and doing other business in branches within Ecuador. Although the Banking Superintendency nominally regulated these offshore operations, it was unable in fact to work effectively outside Ecuador. After the crisis began in 1998, the authorities’ inadequate knowledge of the offshore banks’ situation complicated their ability to deal with it. This is why in December 1998, for example, the authorities had little choice but to extend the same guarantee to offshore deposits that they provided to onshore deposits. The March 1999 deposit freeze applied to the off-shore banks, but banking authorities in some places— in particular, the United States—did not recognize it.19 Since the onset of the crisis, the authorities have concluded that, however logical the argument for allowing offshore operations may once have seemed, their inability to supervise such operations left the authorities little choice but to conclude them (the March 2000 dollarization legislation provided for a gradual phase-out).


pages: 93 words: 30,572

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) by Nick Clegg

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, sceptred isle, Snapchat, Steve Bannon

Perhaps most strikingly of all, the Brexit elite stretches well beyond Britain itself. Some of the key players neither live nor pay taxes in the UK. The Legatum Institute – a think tank driven by a libertarian, low-regulation philosophy and amateur ideas about Britain’s future trade policy – has deep pockets linked to offshore finance, and is so well connected to the heart of Whitehall that it was invited, inexplicably, to join a cast of top corporate chief executives in a meeting with David Davis in his country residence, Chevening, in the summer of 2017.62 Dizzyingly wealthy individuals in the US have lent their financial clout to support libertarian US think tanks, in their promotion of small government, low tax and in some cases environmentally questionable policies – an ideological outlook that overlaps with anti-EU thinking across Europe.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

‘When they say it is legal, they actually are very often careful about not defining where it is legal, or how legal systems interact.’ Jersey may be a tax haven, but Section 134A of its tax code is a tough anti-abuse measure for local residents, forcing them to pay all the tax they owe. The ingeniousness of tax havens such as Jersey is that they allow the wealthy elites of foreign countries to use them as somewhere to record their transactions, granting them the ability to undermine the tax law of their country of origin. Crucially, they could do so in total secrecy. Multinational empires simply move profits around their subsidiaries in different tax havens. Their costs end up in countries with higher rates of tax, and those costs then end up deducted against tax; their profits, on the other hand, end up in tax havens such as Jersey.

The public school ‘old boys’ network was broken up: after all, this new Establishment was not bound together by personal backgrounds, but by a shared way of thinking. The trading floor disappeared in favour of electronic transactions. The City after Big Bang could cater for higher demand than it had previously, and money surged into London’s financial heart. ‘Britain became a semi-offshore financial sector,’ says Ha-Joon Chang. As manufacturing was left to rot, it would increasingly be claimed that the Treasury was dependent on the revenues of the financial sector – which in turn ensured that the sector’s lobbying power became ever greater. These revenues are a common Establishment justification for protecting and entrenching the hegemonic position of the City.

When in the mid-1980s he joined a forerunner of the accountancy firm KPMG, Murphy was told that if he kept his head down he could become a partner in a decade or so: ambitious and driven, his response was to resign on the spot. He helped set up companies in the UK and elsewhere and, at the age of twenty-six, helped bring the iconic board game Trivial Pursuit to Britain. ‘Nobody thought there was anything pernicious about tax havens,’ he recalls as we sit outside a café in East London on a glorious August day. ‘Nobody knew very much about them, there were no academic studies on them. But I saw tax haven activity and I just decided it offended my morality.’ With two other partners, Murphy set up his own accountancy business. It was a firm with a difference: it would not offshore people’s tax affairs, create trusts or engage in other forms of tax avoidance.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

See www.gabv.org/ (accessed December 10, 2012). 27. On the distinction among purchase, lending, and gift money, see Rudolf Steiner, Rethinking Economics: Lectures and Seminars on World Economics (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2013). 28. Matthew Valencia, “Storm Survivors,” Economist, special report on offshore finance (February 16–22, 2013): 4. 29. Fritz Andres, “Alterndes Geld im Mittelalter,” Info 3 (June 1994): 17. Chapter 8. Leading from the Emerging Future 1. Bill Torbert, “The Practice of Action Inquiry,” in Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, eds., Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 250. 2.

Remember the $1.5 trillion in foreign transactions, not even 5 percent of which is connected to anything in the real economy? That’s how big it is. It’s a huge problem—and there is a lot of money at stake for very tiny but powerful special-interest groups that feed themselves from the oversized extractive bubble in the outer sphere. Estimates of how much private wealth is brought to offshore tax havens in order to (often illegally, but in some cases legally) avoid taxes that should have been paid are US$20 trillion (US$20,000 billion!).28 Redirecting the flow of this money to serving the global commons would have an amazing instant impact globally. It’s possible. But it takes common will. The path to the future, to Economy 4.0, requires a shift at the gravitational center of our economy from primarily 1.0 and 2.0 communications (the outer two spheres) to 3.0 and 4.0 conversations and relationships (the inner two spheres).


pages: 180 words: 61,340

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

From their profitable strategy IKB has announced losses of roughly $15 billion, though their actual losses are probably greater, as German banks are slow to declare anything. Röthig viewed himself, with some justice, more as victim than perpetrator. “I left the bank in December 2005,” he says quickly, as he squeezes himself into a small booth. Then he explains. The idea for the offshore bank had been his. The German management at IKB had taken to it, as he put it, “like a baby takes to candy.” He’d created the bank when the market was paying higher returns to bondholders: Rhineland Funding was paid well for the risk it was taking. By the middle of 2005, with the financial markets refusing to see a cloud in the sky, the price of risk had collapsed: the returns on the bonds backed by American consumer loans had collapsed.

For the United States to achieve a proportionally distortive demographic effect it would need to hand green cards to 17.5 million Mexicans. HOW DID ANY of this happen? There are many theories: the elimination of trade barriers, the decision to grant free public higher education, a low corporate tax rate introduced in the 1980s, which turned Ireland into a tax haven for foreign corporations. Maybe the most intriguing was offered by a pair of demographers at Harvard, David E. Bloom and David Canning, in a 2003 paper called “Contraception and the Celtic Tiger.” Bloom and Canning argued that a major cause of the Irish boom was a dramatic increase in the ratio of working-age to non–working-age Irishmen, brought about by a crash in the Irish birthrate.


Fodor's Caribbean 2012 by Fodor's Travel Publications Inc.

jitney, offshore financial centre

Ursula, martyred in the 4th century ad . Pirates and buccaneers followed, and then came the British, who farmed the islands until slavery was abolished in 1834. The BVI are still politically tied to Britain, so the queen appoints a royal governor, but residents elect a local Legislative Council. Offshore banking and tourism share top billing in the territory’s economy, but the majority of the islands’ jobs are tourism-related. Despite the growth, you can usually find a welcoming smile. TOP ATTRACTIONS With more than 60 islands in the chain, sailors can drop anchor at a different, perfect beach every day.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

He criticized Rachel for describing a house Arif owned in Pakistan as a compound, a word he suggested she used to conjure the ghost of Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a compound in Pakistan. The judge asked how much Arif was worth. “He is an extremely wealthy individual but not in liquid form?” “Yes,” Hugo replied. “With trusts you don’t know how liquid he is,” the judge said. Trusts are secretive offshore bank accounts. “He is a world-renowned global CEO,” Hugo said. “He is entitled to the court’s trust. He has strong ties to the jurisdiction. He was educated here. The majority of members of his family are here.” The court rose as the judge left the room to consider his decision. He returned about an hour later to dismiss the U.S. government’s appeal and granted Arif the £15 million bail.

To comply with the regulator, Abraaj was required to keep a few million dollars in a Dubai bank account at all times, in case the firm ran into financial difficulty. What Arif didn’t brag about was that Abraaj was really made up of a tangled web of more than three hundred companies based mostly in tax havens around the world. The company that was regulated in Dubai—Abraaj Capital Ltd.—was just a small piece of this global network. The two most important Abraaj companies were incorporated in the Cayman Islands and weren’t regulated by Dubai’s watchdog. They were called Abraaj Investment Management Ltd. and Abraaj Holdings Ltd.

The U.S. corporate tax rate has halved since the 1950s, and some countries struggle to raise much tax at all—less than 2 percent of Pakistan’s 216 million citizens paid income tax in 2019. Accounting firms like KPMG—which are supposed to monitor the integrity of financial statements—also advise companies and the wealthy on how to minimize their tax bills. Offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, where Abraaj was incorporated, help the rich to avoid taxes too. American billionaires can also reduce their taxes by making philanthropic donations to causes of their own choosing. So when billionaires and CEOs meet politicians at Davos and talk publicly about improving the state of the world, it’s fair to assume that improving the state of the world isn’t necessarily the only thing they have in mind.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

An income trust? Buy a plane ticket to Switzerland and open up a bank account there? The more I read, the more confused I got, and quite frankly, the dirtier I felt. Many of these schemes were unabashedly sneaky and borderline illegal, and for every book or article that espoused the values of offshore banking, I saw a headline that read “Person arrested for evading taxes using shell company!” No, thanks. Whatever I was going to do, I wanted it to be 100 percent aboveboard. Everything had to be legal, with no sleazy tricks. Every strategy or tax break I employed needed to be an intentional one provided by the government.

., 14 Mason, Charlotte, 242 matching contribution, 125, 130 “math shit up,” 86, 87 math vs. passion, 28, 28–33, 31–32 McCurry, Justin, 233, 234–35, 236–37, 237–38, 239, 245, 246, 257 median salaries, 256–66, 257–58, 261, 263, 265–66 “Medicaid gap,” 227 medical debt, 226 medical waste, digging in, 3–4, 9, 111, 157, 189 mediocre grades, 16, 47, 48 Melissa’s story, 50–51 mesolimbic pathway, 63–64, 65 Mexico, 195, 201, 211, 240, 264 the middle class, 53–170 Millennial Revolution (blog), xii millennials (“Me Me Me Generation”), 49 Miller, Hannah, 244 millionaires, types of, 269–75, 270–72 million to break free, not needed, 256–67, 303–8 missiles vs. bullets, 213–14, 214 mistakes, not dwelling on, 58–59, 60, 61, 168 Modern Portfolio Theory, 101–3, 101–4, 113–17, 114, 114–15, 116, 119 modified adjusted gross income (MAGI), 226 money appreciating money, 11–12 bleeding for money, 9, 157 debt distorting the value of money, 36–37 following first money, 32, 252–53 most important thing in the world, 9 NOT worth dying for, 157 running out of money, the fear of, 248–49 survival and money, 8–9 time link, 35, 37, 159, 161, 165, 165–69, 167–68, 267, 270 understanding money, 276 See also quitting like a millionaire Moody’s, 182 “more” as key to happiness, 18 “more dopamine = more happiness,” 64 mortgages, 44, 44, 45, 83–88, 84, 84 mother of author, 3, 4, 7, 8, 17, 26, 27, 49, 80, 250 MrMoneyMustache.com (blog), 229, 233, 234, 239, 246, 248, 251, 273 MSCI EAFE Index, 100, 106, 107, 110, 111, 111, 114, 114, 116, 178, 185–86 Musk, Elon, 270 mutual funds, 90–91, 92, 94, 108, 109, 110 National College Entrance Exam (NCEE), 23–24 New York, 32, 121, 227, 252 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 98 The New York Times, 63 Nick’s story, 51 Nielsen BookScan, 254 “non-lucrative visas” (wealth visas), 199 non-qualified dividends and taxes, 142 no one’s coming to save you, 46–52 North America, cost of traveling, 191–92 North Carolina, 234, 246, 257 “no sneaky tricks” restriction, 136–37, 154 nucleus accumbens, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71 Obamacare (ACA), 226–27, 228, 231, 237–38 offshore banking, 136, 144 oil crash (2015), 175, 203–4, 273 The 100 Startup (Guillebeau), 262 One More Year Syndrome, 248 One Red Paperclip (MacDonald), 160 Ontario, 153, 230, 244 open-loop vs. closed-loop, 213–16, 214, 216 Optimizers (millionaires), 272, 272–73, 274–75 outsourcing, 200 overconsumption (Western-style), 55 Pacioli, Luca, 36 panic attacks, 157, 273, 276 Partial FI, 259, 262–64, 263, 266, 267 part-time work, 213, 218 passion vs. financial considerations, 26–33, 252–53 passive income, 260, 262, 263, 265 the past doesn’t matter, 57–61 Pay as You Earn (PAYE), 40, 41 payment reduction of student debt, 39–41, 41, 45 Pay-over-Tuition (POT), 28, 28, 30–33, 31–32, 39, 59, 186, 253, 259 pensions, 50, 199, 208 percentages beating dollars, 91–92 Perpetual Re-retirement, 164, 216–17, 218 Perry, Katy, 24 perseverance, 16, 20 personal exemption, 153, 206 personal finance, 268–69, 269, 270–72 Pike, Christopher, 14 pleasure and dopamine, 64, 65 plumbers, 32, 32 poor people and taxes, 121–22 portfolio, designing a, 104–5, 104–10, 107–8, 110, 120 Portfolio Bucket, 204, 205, 206–7, 217 Portugal, 195, 197, 199, 211, 221 possessions vs. experiences, 66–69, 68–69 poverty, 1–52.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

The spokesperson for the Russian Office of the Prosecutor General told the author that Aleksanyan’s account of these offers ‘cannot be considered truthful’, without elaborating ‘even the doctors’: Aleksanyan Supreme Court testimony captors decided otherwise: Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, par 132 ‘our country is perishing’: R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky, trans, Dead Souls, Random House, 1996, pp.392–3, quoted in Peter Sahlas, ‘The Dual State Takes Hold in Russia: A Challenge for the West’ Chapter 5: Silhouette the silhouette: ‘Tax Haven Banks and US Tax Compliance (Day One)’, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, July 17, 2008, hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/hearings/tax-haven-banks-and-u-s-tax-compliance transporting diamonds: Lynnley Browning, ‘Ex-UBS Banker Pleads Guilty in Tax Evasion’, New York Times, June 20, 2008, nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20tax.html slipped him a note: Interview with Elise Bean, then staff director of and chief counsel to Levin’s committee American prosecutors: Joanna Chung and Haig Simonian, ‘Ex-UBS employee charged over US tax fraud’, Financial Times, May 14, 2008, ft.com/content/e3dba448-212b-11dd-a0e6-000077b07658 sensed what was coming: Bradley C.

Forbes of Health Management Ltd, June 18, 2014 Chapter 27: Doubles still earning less: Chris Belfield, Jonathan Cribb, Andrew Hood, Robert Joyce, Living Standards, Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2014, Institute for Fiscal Studies, July 2014, ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/r96.pdf ‘We’ve got to make more cuts’: Rowena Mason, ‘Chancellor says more cuts on way in “year of hard truths”’, Guardian, January 6, 2014, theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/06/george-osborne-more-cuts-year-hard-truths Sasha’s celebrations: Event Concept promotional video, eventconcept.co.uk/case-studies/projects/60th-birthday-party first time in ten years: William MacNamara and Alison Smith, ‘Tensions deepen for ENRC as two directors dismissed’, Financial Times, June 9, 2011 danger in that: Letter from Roger Ewart Smith, the Rothschild banker advising the Kazakh government on the buyout of ENRC, to Kairat Kelimbetov, June 14, 2013 Peter Mandelson . . . made that very point: Peter Mandelson email to Kairat Kelimbetov, May 19, 2013 moodily concluded: ‘Response of the Independent Committee of the Board of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation plc to the Offer for ENRC by Eurasian Resources Group BV’, August 8, 2013, investegate.co.uk/eurasian-natural-res--enrc-/rns/response-to-offer/201308081504283057L business plan . . . appoint the management: Roger Ewart Smith letter to Kairat Kelimbetov and other officials, December 9, 2013 on the hook: Rothschild presentation for the Kazakh government, October 17, 2013 ‘Everybody understands’: Gil Shefler, ‘Kazakh tycoon plans pro-Israel TV network to rival Al-Jazeera’, Jerusalem Post, April 8, 2011 Chapter 28: The System surge of relief: ‘These issues have weighed heavily on my mind,’ Nigel wrote to his superiors at the FCA on August 18, 2014, while they were investigating his conduct moved to Monaco: The 2011–12 issue of Banking & Finance Monaco names Khofiz Shakhidi among the senior vice presidents of BSI Monaco, p.107, zyyne.com/pdf;6303 Bahamas: Shaxson, Treasure Islands, p.105; Nick Shaxson, ‘The Bahamas tax haven – a (re-)emerging global menace?’, Tax Justice Network, September 8, 2016, taxjustice.net/2016/09/08/bahamas-tax-haven-emerging-global-menace; interview with Bahamas private banker a mother of four in Margate: Paul Hooper, ‘Margate mum Emma Truscott jailed for receiving nearly £55,000 in illegal benefits’, Kent Online, November 18, 2014, kentonline.co.uk/thanet/news/mum-jailed-for-55k-benefit-27124 offered an amnesty: Richard Brooks, The Great Tax Robbery, Oneworld, 2014, pp.201–5; Tom Burgis and Vanessa Houlder, ‘HMRC: The taxman cometh’, Financial Times, August 20, 2015, ft.com/content/3fa2fd16-42bd-11e5-b98b-87c7270955cf James Bond: Nigel Wilkins email to intelligence officer at the Financial Services Authority, December 11, 2008 asleep at the wheel: Disciplinary Investigation Report, p.24 a $7 million reward: ‘Who’s the criminal?’

To another journalist – Glenn Simpson, an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal with an interest in post-Soviet kleptocrats – Sugar had imparted a bounty of dual-state secrets. Simpson wrote that Sugar ‘painted a picture of a Kazakh economy in which the president not only routinely takes illicit commissions but also holds hidden stakes in the copper, uranium and hydrocarbon industries, and maintains a network of offshore bank accounts’. But the worst thing Sugar had done had been his attempt, back when he was loyal, to incriminate his rivals in Nazarbayev’s court: the Trio and the former prime minister Kazhegeldin. Following his tip about dubious Kazakh money flowing through Europe, the Belgian police had alerted a magistrate in Geneva, who had found Nazarbayev’s Swiss bank accounts.


pages: 365 words: 102,306

Legacy: Gangsters, Corruption and the London Olympics by Michael Gillard

Boris Johnson, business intelligence, centre right, Crossrail, forensic accounting, Jeremy Corbyn, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), upwardly mobile, working-age population, young professional

However, detectives raided his solicitor’s office before he had a chance to make the drop. They identified the offshore company from seized documents and spoke to the nominee directors in the Isle of Man, who immediately resigned. Holmes didn’t care too much; he simply used one of his aliases to replace them. Offshore banking secrecy laws did the rest, putting the company’s assets beyond the reach of the law. However, detectives finally caught a break from other seized paperwork. It turned out that Holmes was engaged in a complex mortgage fraud using false identities named after characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to hide control of premises used for the harder end of the porn game.

The property company that owned the building was still in trouble with its bank and needed a quick sale of the freehold.2 Oxley was told to start negotiations to buy it while pretending to be Holmes, who held the lease under a pseudonym. Meanwhile, Hunt turned to Chris Williams, a pudgy property lawyer, to complete the Soho coup. Williams got a court order freezing the NatWest bank account where Holmes had deposited the stolen £100,000.3 Hunt and Williams then flew from London to the offshore tax haven of Jersey to meet Peter Michel in his cramped office. Michel came highly recommended by the businessman who had recently sold Hunt the land for his new waste disposal and scrap metal business in Dagenham.4 A slight and polished man, 48-year-old Michel cut his teeth acting for Formula One racing teams and the owner of a well-known restaurant chain.

He headed straight for his lockup in Brighton to recover more of the money from the drug deal that he had concluded before fleeing abroad in March. Holmes still had no idea that Gary Oxley was now working for his sworn enemy. On the contrary, he was assured that the Soho rents were being paid into a Midland Bank savings account in Jersey. However, when he flew to the tax haven the account was empty and Oxley nowhere to be found. Holmes rented a flat in Dublin as a base from where he could make hit and run strikes in Soho. He soon collared Oxley who confessed, claiming Hunt had threatened his life if he didn’t hand over the offshore company documents. Shortly thereafter, 2 Green’s Court was firebombed, the first message that guerrilla war had been declared in Soho.


pages: 362 words: 86,195

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet by Joseph Menn

Brian Krebs, dumpster diving, fault tolerance, Firefox, John Markoff, Menlo Park, offshore financial centre, pirate software, plutocrats, popular electronics, profit motive, RFID, Silicon Valley, zero day

And the news got worse from there. In a single month the previous fall, at the peak of the attacks in Costa Rica, a staggering $1.2 million had passed through the couple’s account. The day before they disappeared, phone records showed repeated calls to numbers in the Turks & Caicos Islands, an offshore banking haven. Andy had thought Stran was just another mule, someone who passed along money to the big players. Now it looked like Stran was the kingpin—and one who had been tipped off by the authorities, to boot. The police did find Timur’s brother, Yan Arutchev, believed to be the last part of Stran.

Those investors who still had a stomach for the industry turned to gambling companies with few or no customers in the U.S. After President George W. Bush signed the online gambling ban into law on October 13, 2006, Justice Department prosecutors really turned on the gas, starting with one of the big companies that handled payments, Neteller Plc. Based in the Irish Sea tax haven of the Isle of Man, Neteller had been founded in 1999 by Canadians John Lefebvre and Stephen Lawrence as an Internet payment system like PayPal. It became increasingly important to online gamblers after credit cards and big banks stopped sending money to companies that were obviously in the betting business.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

None of this is the outcome of inexorable economic forces, either; it’s the result of policies and politics—what we did and didn’t do. If our politics leads to preferential taxation of those who earn income from capital; to an education system in which the children of the rich have access to the best schools, but the children of the poor go to mediocre ones; to exclusive access by the wealthy to talented tax lawyers and offshore banking centers to avoid paying a fair share of taxes—then it is not surprising that there will be a high level of inequality and a low level of opportunity. And if these policies continue, these conditions will grow even worse. And now it’s also clear that the high level of economic inequality has translated into gross new forms of political inequality—to the point where we can more aptly be described as having a political system with “one dollar, one vote” than “one person, one vote.”

“Loopholes” does not adequately describe the flaws in our tax system; “gaps” might be better. Closing them might end the specter of the very rich almost proudly disclosing that they pay a tax rate on their disclosed income at half the rate of those with less income, and that they keep their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. No one can claim that the inhabitants of these small islands know how to manage money better than the wizards of Wall Street; but it seems as though that money grows better in the sunshine of these beach resorts! One of the few advantages of there being so much money at the top of the income ladder, with close to a quarter of all income going to the top 1 percent, is that slight increases in taxes at the top can now raise large amounts of money.

But there is a far better solution, and one that the individual U.S. states have discovered: have corporations pay taxes based on the economic activity they conduct in the United States, on the basis of a simple formula reflecting their sales, their production, and their research activities here, and tax corporations that invest in the United States at lower rates than those that don’t. In this way we could increase investment and employment here at home—a far cry from the current system, in which we in effect encourage even U.S. corporations to produce elsewhere. (Even if U.S. taxes are no higher than the average, there are some tax havens—like Ireland—that are engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to recruit companies to make their country their tax home.) Such a reform would end the corporate stampede toward “inversions,” changing a corporation’s tax home to avoid taxes. Where they claim their home office is would make little difference; only where they actually do business would.


pages: 384 words: 121,574

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption by Patrick Alley

airport security, blood diamond, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, fake news, Global Witness, lockdown, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, satellite internet, Steve Bannon, Ted Sorensen

Corruption kills millions of people ‘over there’ every year, as they die in resource-funded wars, or from lack of food or basic healthcare because their political leaders have looted their nations’ coffers. But the corruptors – the criminals and corporations that pay the bribes, and the enablers who help park the proceeds in luxury real estate in London, New York, Paris and beyond, or in offshore bank accounts where their spoils are safe from prying eyes – are very much ‘over here’. The perpetrators might well live next door to you. Corruption is a cancer that eats away at societies. It chews the innards out of the rule of law; it favours the rich and powerful at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable people; it undermines international efforts to protect the environment and it gnaws away at the foundations of democracy itself.

To make and then hide the billions of dollars of countries’ wealth stolen every year, you need a whole service industry behind you. Happily for the criminals, it already exists. Most of us use parts of it ourselves, comfortably unaware that some of our fellow customers are crooks who use the same lawyers, banks and accountancy firms we do. Most of us have heard of those tax havens based on palm-fringed islands in the Caribbean or the Pacific, but we are perhaps less aware that most of them are also ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ whose business is to register companies that mask the real owner’s identity. And we are probably less aware again that the US and the UK and its dependent territories are the biggest secrecy jurisdictions of them all.

I was in Liberia with two Global Witness colleagues, Natalie Ashworth and Sofia Goinhas, and our old Liberian friend and campaigning partner from the civil war days, Silas Siakor. We were there to investigate a massive mining deal struck between the government of Liberia and Mittal Steel, owned by the UK’s richest man. Most of our work required immersing ourselves in the labyrinthine legalese of mining contracts and tracking the movement of profits through different tax havens: structures designed to minimize taxes paid in Liberia and to maximize profits for the company. The trip to the derelict mine site helped us understand the situation on the ground. And it helped us understand something else too. Like almost everything in Liberia, Yekepa had been shattered by 15 years of civil war that had ended just three years previously.


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Culture wars, ‘family values’, lifestyle choices, ‘political correctness’, the age and sex of politicians, and the way they dress and look and speak deliver an unending supply of opportunities for pseudo-participation in pseudo-debates, never allowing for boredom to arise: whether the foreign minister should or should not have his male companion accompany him on a state visit to the Middle East; if there are enough women cabinet members, and in sufficiently powerful positions; how female ministers attend to their small children, too little or too much; whether the president of the Republic should use a motor cycle when visiting his lover; and how often a week the minister of economic affairs takes his daughter to Kindergarten in the morning. With exciting issues like these filling the public space, who will want to hear about the entirely predictable failure of international financial diplomacy to agree on meaningful regulation of offshore banking and the shadow banking system? While I fully concur with Merkel’s diagnosis of the current demise of democracy in the course of capitalist development, I am a little concerned about the way Merkel sets up his argument conceptually, in particular about the ‘model’ language he uses to structure his exposition.

A contributing factor was the ‘globalization’ of the capitalist economy, which led to increased tax competition among countries, resulting in tax cuts for corporations and earners of high incomes.14 It also extended the opportunities for owners of capital to evade taxation by moving assets between countries or into international tax havens.15 If, in other words, the increasing fiscal problems of the rich capitalist democracies after the 1970s were due a revolution of rising demands, that revolution occurred not among ordinary citizens, but among capital and those in command of it. Another respect in which early theories of fiscal crisis had failed to anticipate what was coming was that they underestimated the possibilities of capitalist states to finance deficits for a protracted period of time by borrowing.

For example, one might have mentioned declining overall growth rates intensifying distributional conflicts and sharply paring down the willingness of the rich to make concessions to the poor. One could also have spent more time on what I believe is a particularly important aspect of the weakening of states and governments, which is the immense capacity today of rich citizens and corporations to escape taxation by moving income to low-tax jurisdictions, or capital to tax havens. The results include a weakening ability of states to redistribute to the bottom of their societies, together with increasingly degressive taxation and rising indebtedness of underfunded states unable to discharge their obligations to their citizens with their stagnant or shrinking tax revenue.


pages: 554 words: 168,114

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century by Tom Bower

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, bonus culture, California energy crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Global Witness, index fund, interest rate swap, John Deuss, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, land bank, LNG terminal, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, megaproject, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Oscar Wyatt, passive investing, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, price stability, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The auditors found hefty sums paid for “travel expenses” to politicians and government officials and their families. Usually the same expenses were also paid by the government, and the officials kept the difference. At the top level, vast sums of money received from Shell in royalties and taxes were diverted by Nigeria’s politicians and officials to private offshore bank accounts. Brian Lavers, Shell’s country chairman until 1991, had been under pressure to pay bribes to government officials and local chiefs. To avoid participating in any illegal activity, Shell’s board agreed to pay middlemen, farmers and tribal chiefs as “consultants” and for “services” to build social amenities including schools, roads and cinemas.

Officially, the Western oil majors repudiated kickbacks, but circumstances made refusal difficult. Many key officials in the food chain in Russia and around the Caspian asked contractors to pay for “services” supplied by intermediate companies especially established for skimming. The service fees were deposited in offshore bank accounts, especially in the Cayman Islands. While Statoil of Norway had been caught and expelled from Iran for bribing the son of President Rafsanjani, there were no supervisors in Russia or around the Caspian likely to cause such embarrassment. Nor was Washington complaining. Corruption was tolerated for the sake of democracy’s future.

They could no longer buy more assets, Browne was told, but they needed to pay officials more bribes to keep their empires. Evidence of the oligarchs’ declining influence, said BP’s advisers, was Roman Abramovich’s agreement to sell Sibneft to Gazprom for $14 billion. That money, it was speculated, would be deposited in an offshore bank to be divided between Abramovich and Alexei Miller. Only John Gerson, another former MI6 officer, argued the opposite, that BP was “in for big trouble.” All those reports, except Gerson’s, encouraged Hayward to calculate that the Kremlin would direct Fridman and the partners to be similarly paid off.


pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

As for making all tax returns public, as in Finland, the government’s political imagination failed. It did blow wind into HMRC sails. New disclosure rules in 2004 allowed the tax authorities to take swifter action on loopholes; court rulings gave them access to 400,000 offshore bank accounts held by UK residents, 100,000 of which were not declaring income or interest. After the crash, in a stable-doors exercise, rescued banks had to list where they sheltered their money – one had 500 tax-haven subsidiaries. In April 2009 HMRC set up a High Net Worth Unit, looking at complex share and property dealings. The Germans had shown the power of shame when in 2008 they started buying stolen computer discs containing Swiss and Liechtenstein bank records.

Donna Charmaine Henry on the Clapham Park Estate believed CCTV improved their lives, and demand was strong in crime-prone areas for more, not less, surveillance. But the consequent charge against Labour is inconsistency. These ministers acted tough on crime and terrorism; a tough state would have pursued crime into the boardrooms and tax havens. Anti-social behaviour in the streets was penalized, while grand larceny in the City was winked at. A tough state would have made the connection between deregulated labour markets and migration chaos. Brown’s infatuation with the neoliberal, hands-off approach led him to pursue low wages and – we now know – the importation of large numbers of unskilled migrants.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

With shiny lobbies, Victorian-style insignia, and names conveying integrity and security, these exchange houses can look similar to bank branches, but they operate outside the banking system. In addition to swapping dollars for pesos, they manage a network of accounts to shift money overseas at lower costs than bank wires. Now that the government was placing strict constraints on offshore bank wires, these places were in demand as convenient, extra-official money transmitters. I was uncomfortable with this seemingly shady option, but Miguel, my closest friend in Buenos Aires, told me that this casa de cambio handled his business weekly in fully legal transactions with his associates overseas.

Ironically, this rise to a new level of mania—even beyond that of bitcoin’s first four years of existence—would eventually force bitcoin’s supporters to confront the challenges of its Wild West days and contemplate how it might mature. The mania’s starting point was in March 2013, with what we’ll call the Cypriot bump. The tiny island nation of Cyprus, split between Greek and Turkish states, fell into the grip of a financial crisis because its banks, their cash balances swollen with deposits from wealthy Russians seeking a tax haven, had invested heavily in the bonds of neighboring Greece. That larger neighbor had become the basket case of the European Union, which had just forced the government in Athens to impose a “haircut,” or mandated losses, on its investors. The EU did this to ensure that private-sector investors who’d made risky bets on Greece shouldered some of the burden of the bailout that German and other euro-zone taxpayers were bearing.

Because of this, shifting money around the region’s island nations requires constant and costly currency exchanges, which further undermines trade relationships that are already constrained because their tourism-, finance-, and commodity-heavy economies compete with rather than complement each other. To make matters worse, a number of central banks impose capital controls on their citizens. Barbadians such as Ifill, for instance, are limited in the amount of foreign currency they can buy. That Barbados, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean nations serve as tax havens for hedge funds and other foreign financial institutions is an irony not lost on the region’s tightly controlled residents. This mix of monetary systems and financial regulations, and the frustration that it breeds, make the sunny islands of the Caribbean ripe for bitcoin—or so says Gabriel Abed.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Along with its proliferating legal troubles across the United States, Europe, and Asia, Binance had thousands of newly alienated customers and one of the world’s top law firms ready to use it as an example of what happened when an unregulated crypto exchange was put under the microscope. Binance probably faced significant legal headwinds, but it had developed a distributed—and mostly unaccountable—corporate structure that would be the envy of any offshore financial concern. It was hard to see how this “democratization of finance” was going to lead to a fairer economy rather than a more chaotic one, with a vast gulf between winners and losers. The liberatory rhetoric and experimental economics of crypto could be alluring, but they amplified many of the worst qualities of our existing capitalist system while privileging a minority group of early adopters and well-connected insiders.

We mentioned this to the gentleman we were interviewing; it seemed more than a touch reckless to have nearly all of one’s income and net worth in volatile crypto tokens. We asked how he juggled all of the different digital currencies. “Well, there’s another DAO that helps with that,” he said. His dream was to move to Portugal, a burgeoning crypto tax haven. Nearly everyone we interviewed had been scammed. When asked, most admitted it quite readily. It was, if not a rite of passage, then an accepted cost of entry to an unfettered market defined by financial freedom. Bad actors are everywhere—certainly in so-called TradFi, or traditional finance—so why should crypto be different?


pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

He also wanted to know who had financially benefited from the Hermitage Capital theft. During their luncheon, he, Simpson, and Schmidt discussed the possibility of hiring SNS Global to help him trace the stolen money. It seemed like a perfect assignment for Simpson’s talents, one that would involve a forensic dissection of shell companies, offshore banks, and shady investment vehicles. In the end, Browder decided to have his own staff at Hermitage Capital conduct the search and the pleasant lunch that Simpson and Browder shared that sunny day was likely the last time they shared friendly words. BEFORE LONG, GLENN SIMPSON and Sue Schmidt faced a far bigger problem than landing new clients.

GLENN SIMPSON GOT HIS start in his oppo career in 2012, when President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign hired Fusion GPS to muddy up Mitt Romney, his Republican opponent. Simpson met with journalists at The New York Times and other publications to shop stories about Romney’s time as head of a large private equity firm, Bain Capital. The firm had profited by laying off scores of workers at companies and Romney, who was a multimillionaire, had used offshore tax havens to shelter his wealth. The Obama campaign would make Romney’s wealth and time at Bain Capital lynchpins of its attacks against him but Fusion GPS soon tipped its hand in that attack because of an amateurish mistake. The episode unfolded when a clerk at a courthouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho, received a phone call from someone in the summer of 2012 seeking copies of lawsuits filed there against a local businessman who was a major Romney donor.


How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D. Schiff, Andrew J. Schiff

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business climate, currency peg, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, price stability, Robert Shiller, technology bubble

Limiting what could be charged for a product without doing anything to control the decreasing value of money simply meant that manufacturers and retailers couldn’t make a profit. As a result, they stopped selling and a black market of illegally high-priced merchandise arose. Sensing the trouble with Fish Reserve Notes, some citizens tried to protect the value of their remaining savings by depositing fish in an offshore bank, where their savings would be protected from senatorial slicing and dicing. But when the senators noticed this trend, they made it illegal to move savings off the island. The fear of shrinking fish became so prevalent that no deposits were left in the bank for long. Every fish caught was immediately sliced up and consumed.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And he had something valuable to trade for his freedom: the encrypted records of all the depositors who had put money into Guardian Trust. So he cut a deal. He pled guilty (and was sentenced to five years’ probation and five hundred hours of community service). And he told the government everything he knew about tax cheats. The most interesting information Mathewson had to offer was that offshore banks were no longer catering only to drug dealers and money launderers. Instead, these banks served many Americans who had earned their money honestly but simply didn’t want to pay taxes on it. As Mathewson told a Senate panel in 2000, “Most of [Guardian’s] clients were legitimate business people and professionals.”

This saved him $2.1 million in unpaid taxes. (It also eventually earned him a five-month stint in federal prison, where he was sent after pleading guilty to tax evasion.) Mathewson’s clients were not alone, either. In fact, the nineties saw a boom in tax evasion. By the end of the decade, two million Americans had credit cards from offshore banks. Fifteen years earlier, almost none did. Promoters, who often used the Internet to push their scams, advertised “layered trusts,” “offshore asset protection trusts,” and “constitutional pure trusts.” A small but obstinate (and obtuse) group of tax evaders advised people that they didn’t have to pay their taxes because the income tax had never actually been passed by Congress.


pages: 452 words: 110,488

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The IRS reports that tax evasion has gotten worse in recent years, costing the U.S. Treasury a minimum of $250 billion a year, and maybe twice that. Wealthy Americans are the biggest offenders, but sophisticated tax evasion is becoming a more populist activity. For example, as many as two million Americans now have illegal offshore bank accounts that they use to evade taxes, a problem that increased dramatically in the 1990s. Good weather, it turns out, is only part of the Caribbean's appeal. ♦ A leading high school basketball player named LeBron James, the next Michael Jordan some say, shows up one day at his school in Akron driving a new $50,000 Hummer H2 sports utility vehicle crammed with three TVs.

At the same time, federal agencies like the SEC, the IRS, and the Justice Department have been starved of the resources needed to stop white-collar crime. Why not inflate earnings reports if the chances of being prosecuted are next to nil? Why not commit a fraud that nets you $70 million—when a year or two in a Club Fed prison camp is the worst possible punishment? Why not hide your income in an illegal offshore bank account when you know that the IRS is too overwhelmed to bother with you because it actually lost enforcement capacity during the '80 and '90s—even as the number of tax returns increased? Professional watchdog groups have also been asleep on the job. Why worry about being disbarred for bilking your clients when state bar associations lack the resources or wherewithal to fully investigate much of the misconduct by lawyers reported to them?


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Countries higher up along the spectrum of the skills-resource endowment ratio export more manufactured products relative to processed or primary goods, and a larger proportion of higher-technology manufactured products. This seems to be a compelling story of trade relations between Africa and China. 10. See Broadman, Africa’s Silk Road, 289–357. 11. Ibid., 235–287. 12. See Li Anshan, 31, and Martyn Davies, 141, in this volume. 13. Since Mauritius is a major offshore financial center, it is difficult to determine the actual FDI source country, particularly because of pass-through investments. 06-7561-4 ch6.qxd 9/16/08 4:16 PM Page 109 henry lee and dan shalmon 6 Searching for Oil: China’s Oil Strategies in Africa Pressured by skyrocketing demand, Chinese oil companies have branched out across the globe seeking new oil supplies to feed the country’s economic growth.

According to the Office of the President of Zambia, all firms—local, foreign, and Chinese—can establish operations in the zone.17 However, the author was told by China’s MOFCOM that investment in the zone was exclusively for Chinese firms—even Sino-Zambian joint ventures are excluded.18 This lack of clarity over policy from both governments is of concern and needs to be addressed in order to maximize the local developmental benefits that the SEZ will offer to the African private sector. Indian Ocean Rim Trading Hub The second official SEZ was announced in July 2007 and will be located in Mauritius. That country provides a strategic destination for Chinese investment: it is well situated on the Indian Ocean rim; it is an offshore financial center with attractive investment laws; Mauritian firms are well integrated into the economies of South Asia; it is a member of the Southern African Development Community and of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, and thus enjoys preferential market access to the African region; and the country has a sizable ethnic Chinese community that trades with China.


pages: 491 words: 131,769

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

These changes in global economic governance will play out under the watchful eye of a much more extensive group of stakeholders: Brazil, India, China, Russia, and the other countries that make up the ascendant G-20. These increasingly powerful nations will profoundly shape the handling of future crises; so will a host of new players and institutions in the global financial system, like sovereign wealth funds, offshore financial centers, and international monetary unions. The final “Outlook” section surveys the road ahead, taking a hard look at the many dangers that await the world economy. The crisis that gave us the Great Recession may be over for now, but potential pitfalls and risks loom large. What issues will determine the future volatility of the world economy and its financial system?

New York City New York Times New Zealand NINJA (No Income, No Job, [and no] Assets) loans Nixon, Richard M. Northern Pacific Railroad Northern Rock Norway Obama, Barack (Obama administration) regulation and Obstfeld, Maurice Office of National Insurance Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Office of Thrift Supervision offshore financial centers oil price of shocks open market operations optimism Options Clearing Corporation “originate and distribute” model “originate and hold” model overnight repro financing over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives Pakistan pandemics crises compared with death of decoupling and disease vectors and emerging economies and financing of shared excesses and panics, financial of 1825 of 1837 of 1847 of 1857 of 1866 of 1873 of 1893 of 1907 paradox of thrift Paulson, Henry pension fund managers pension funds Peru peso, Argentinian peso, Mexican Philippines Philippon, Thomas Plato Poland politics crisis in Japan lobbying and Ponzi borrowers portfolio insurance Portugal pound, British poverty, the poor prices: decline in deflation and, see deflation feedback theory and future increases in of gold housing increase in monetarist view of oil real estate Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PCDF) Prince, Chuck principal-agent problem Principles of Political Economy (Mills) procyclicality production, industrial productivity proprietary trading strategies protectionism see also tariffs Prussia Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP; Pee-Pip) public works projects Putin, Vladimir quantitative easing railroads Great Britain and Rajan, Raghuram Rand, Ayn random walk theory Rashomon (film) rating agencies reforms and see also specific ratings real estate boom price of real estate bubbles in Japan recession China and deflation and in emerging Europe in Europe exogenous negative supply-side shock and fiscal policy and Great Moderation and in Japan in Latin America monetary policy and in U.S.


pages: 381 words: 101,559

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

On the Creek itself are the dhows—beamy, high-prowed wooden sailing vessels with large lateen rigs ready to embark on the voyage across the Persian Gulf to Bandar Abbas and other ports on the Iranian coast. In Dubai, smuggling is not even vaguely disreputable; it is a way of life. Dubai is an international financial center and tax haven, its boulevards and backstreets choked with international banks. Dubai is the principal offshore banking center for Iran. Major Dubai banks act as correspondents to Iranian banks for the facilitation of payments and foreign exchange transactions with the rest of the world, including Iran’s conversion of its reserves into euros and gold and slow dumping of the dollar.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Consider the sweetheart deals that are so commonplace between university administrations and the businessmen who happen to sit on the university’s board of directors. Consider universities’ real estate operations, which are often thuggish and nearly always tax-free. Consider their army of Washington lobbyists, angling for earmarks and fighting accountability measures. Consider their offshore financial holdings. Or their sleazy arrangements with tobacco companies and Big Pharma and high-tech start-ups. And last, consider the many universities that have raised their tuition to extravagant levels for no reason at all except to take advantage of the quaint American folk belief that price tags indicate quality.


pages: 367 words: 108,689

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis by David Boyle

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Goodhart's law, housing crisis, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mega-rich, Money creation, mortgage debt, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Ocado, Occupy movement, off grid, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pensions crisis, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, precariat, quantitative easing, school choice, scientific management, Slavoj Žižek, social intelligence, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, work culture , working poor

The real stuff of Big Bang, the electronic trading screens, in the form of SEAC (Stock Exchange Automated Quotations), was agreed that July. Barclays led the field, testing the new terminals out in the public, installing five of them in branches in London’s Piccadilly, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Eastbourne and St Helier in Jersey. It was another sign of the times: Jersey was rapidly emerging as the nearly respectable end of offshore banking. The old guard remained unhappy. One broker complained that their new owners ‘treat us like dirt’.[16] The problem was that the merchant banks which had flooded into broking and jobbing were unfamiliar with the culture they had bought, sometimes even reluctant to be there. Brian Winterflood, leading the old Bisgood Bishop team at County NatWest, was particularly frustrated.

Shun the tax avoiders and semi-monopolies It is impossible to imagine a widespread, comfortable middle class if it takes on the task of paying for the infrastructure we all depend on with its taxes, while the corporate world and the global elite does not. The middle classes need to use their political muscle to close the tax havens, but also to use their economic muscle against the growing power of monopoly. There is no doubt that a Big Ten supermarkets would be more competitive, better for the economy, would spread wealth and encourage suppliers, better than our Big Four. The huge privileges we give the biggest retailers — three months to pay their bills, providing them with a rolling interest-free loan big enough to demolish any smaller competitor — are not compatible with a stable economy and a healthy middle class.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

There is, however, one bright spot, Ron Suskind reports in a front-page Wall Street Journal article headlined “Made Safe by Marines, Grenada Now is Haven for Offshore Banks.” The economy may be “in terrible economic shape,” as the head of a local investment firm and member of Parliament observes—thanks to USAID-run structural adjustment programs, the Journal fails to add. But the capital “has become the Casablanca of the Caribbean, a fast-growing haven for money laundering, tax evasion and assorted financial fraud,” with 118 offshore banks, one for every 64 residents. Lawyers, accountants, and some businessmen are doing well; as, doubtless, are the foreign bankers, money launderers, and drug lords, safe from the clutches of the carefully crafted “drug war.”25 The US liberation of Panama recorded a similar triumph.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Credit card companies, including Visa and MasterCard, already had well-established policies against supporting merchants who dealt in pirated or counterfeit goods, making censorship concerns a non-issue. Studies released during the debate showed that 95% of the trade in spam or online counterfeit goods flowed through just three offshore banks. This approach addressed these choke-points. Ironically, though the DNS blocking provisions in SOPA and PIPA represented a drastic departure for how the Internet was architected and policed, its net impact on rogue website activity would have been minimal. Gabriel Levitt Despite the statutory barriers to personal drug importation, the FDA has never prosecuted an individual for personally importing prescription medication for his or her own use.

Credit card companies, including Visa and MasterCard, already had well-established policies against supporting merchants who dealt in pirated or counterfeit goods, making censorship concerns a non-issue. Studies released during the debate showed that 95% of the trade in spam or online counterfeit goods flowed through just three offshore banks. This approach addressed these choke-points. Ironically, though the DNS blocking provisions in SOPA and PIPA represented a drastic departure for how the Internet was architected and policed, its net impact on rogue website activity would have been minimal. THE TEA PARTY ENTERS THE FRAY DAVID SEGAL We had a pretty clear sense of what our role in the effort needed to be, at least for the time-being: Demand Progress was substantially under-resourced, and certainly wouldn’t win this fight on its own, or as party to the small coalition that was responsible for organizing the bulk of the anti-COICA and PIPA work to date.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

But as Milanovic shows, that would be dramatically to understate the bonanza the global 1 per cent – who are still mostly to be found in the West – have reaped since the start of the Great Convergence. The top 1 per cent’s share of the global economy is 15.7 per cent. But if you measure their net wealth, and provide reason­able estimates of what they have salted away in hidden corners, such as the offshore financial havens of the Caribbean and elsewhere, their share jumps to almost a third of global wealth. The nearer the snout you get, the sharper the growth. The world’s wealthiest subset – the 1426 richest individuals on the planet – are worth $5.4 trillion, which is roughly twice the size of the entire British economy and more than the combined assets of the 250 million least wealthy Americans.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

Of course, even the largest prize in the world is not really going to do much to incentivize leaders who face the more immediate daily pressures of political survival. Five million dollars would be pocket change for the leader of an oil- or diamond-rich country who could potentially channel billions of dollars into a secure offshore bank account. Yet the prize has a more subversive purpose: to build a public debate within Africa about leadership and how to improve it. The first winner of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Leadership, awarded in October 2007, was Joaquim Chissano, former president of Mozambique. The judges, chaired by the Ghanaian former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, did not simply announce the result; they explained in detail how they had reached their conclusion.

According to an interview in the Independent in 2006, after he sold his business for £252 million, his accountant advised him to shelter from the British taxman by moving to Monaco. When his wife, Marion, refused to leave their Scottish homeland, the accountant suggested philanthropy as the next most tax-efficient option, and so the Hunter Foundation was born. (Ironically, since then, Monaco and other “tax havens” such as Luxembourg have started to promote themselves as centers of philanthropy.) After that decision he found more positive reasons for philanthropy and has pledged to give away at least £1 billion over his lifetime. He says he is sticking to this goal despite being wiped out by the financial crisis.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In the 1990s and in the 2000s, influence flowed from west to east, in the transplant of economic and political models, the spread of the English language, and the enlargement of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Meanwhile, unregulated spaces of American and European capitalism summoned wealthy Russians into a realm without an east-west geography, that of offshore bank accounts, shell companies, and anonymous deals, where wealth stolen from the Russian people was laundered clean. Partly for this reason, in the 2010s influence flowed from east to west, as the offshore exception became the rule, as Russian political fiction penetrated beyond Russia. In The Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides defined “oligarchy” as rule by the few, and opposed it to “democracy.”

In the 2010s, some of the best of them, in revealing projects such as the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, showed how unregulated international capitalism was creating sinkholes for national wealth. Tyrants first hide and launder their money, then use it to enforce authoritarianism at home—or export it abroad. Money gravitates towards where it cannot be seen, which in the 2010s was in various offshore tax havens. This was a global problem: estimates of just how much money was parked offshore, beyond the reach of national tax authorities, ranged from $7 trillion to $21 trillion. The United States was an especially permissive environment for Russians who wished to steal and then launder money. Much of the Russian national wealth that was supposed to be building the Russian state in the 2000s and 2010s found its way to shell corporations in offshore havens.


pages: 309 words: 95,495

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

And members of the euro zone, if not possessing the same Teutonic dedication to balanced budgets and hard work as Germany, were assumed to at least be getting close; default by a sovereign borrower was unthinkable. For countries on the outside, joining the euro became as much a seal of approval as joining the gold standard had been more than a century earlier. Cyprus, for example, a tiny island country that had long marketed itself as an offshore finance center, in particular to Russians and other eastern Europeans, needed entry to the euro so that the lenders who financed its banks’ sprawling operations around the eastern Mediterranean need not worry about devaluation. The euro led to a surge of lending by northern banks to southern countries and a plunge in the interest rates southern countries paid relative to what Germany paid.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

Official China could ultimately pick sides in these competitions, and thereby greatly increase the fortunes of the favored. To bypass rules banning foreign investment in China’s Internet, every one of China’s Internet companies which has listed overseas—including Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu—has done so through a legal structure known as a variable-interest entity. These are companies, registered in offshore financial centers such as the Cayman Islands, with contracts to receive the profits of the Chinese companies, not ownership of their actual China-based assets. So far, despite existing in a regulatory gray area, these vehicles have withstood legal scrutiny. That could change, especially if the government decided it wanted to exercise greater control over a sector that has long had the habit of operating in areas beyond official oversight.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Hutton argues that China’s economic model is unsustainable because of the contradictions between an authoritarian state and a market economy, and he offers numerous examples of the dysfunctions that result. 9 “Since 1950 only thirteen economies have managed to grow at 7 percent or faster for at least 25 years. However, once one strips out three offshore financial centers and ports that are not fair points of comparison (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malta), an oil field, and an enormous diamond mine with small populations (Oman, Botswana), there are really only eight case studies of interest. Of these, four economies grew and then stalled: Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and earlier, Brazil.

In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”2 Most serious political philosophers, sociologists, and economic historians have long realized that the opposite is true. Any society driven purely by market incentives will fail catastrophically, in economic as well as political terms. The freest, most incentive-driven market economies in the world are not the United States or Hong Kong or even tax havens such as the Cayman Islands but failed states and gangster societies such as Somalia, Congo, and Afghanistan.3 The overriding importance of political institutions in creating the conditions for successful capitalism has been established in great works of social scholarship going back to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.4 But after the Thatcher-Reagan revolutions of the 1980s, business leaders, academic economists, and conservative politicians decided to ignore the historical realities described by sociologists and political scientists in favor of the oversimplified assumptions of market fundamentalist ideologues such as Ayn Rand.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

It costs state governments, conservatively, $12 billion annually in lost revenues. See Declan McCullagh, “Politicians, Retailers Push for New Internet Sales Taxes,” CNET, Apr. 17, 2012; and Deborah Swann, “Weekly Round-up: Another State Strikes a Deal with Amazon,” BNA.com, June 1, 2012. 95. Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14–15. 96. See Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski, “How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes,” New York Times, Apr. 29, 2012, A1, A20, A21. 97. Ibid. 98. Meinrath, Losey, and Pickard, “Digital Feudalism,” 426. 99. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The New Press, 2000), 237. 100.


pages: 192 words: 75,440

Getting a Job in Hedge Funds: An Inside Look at How Funds Hire by Adam Zoia, Aaron Finkel

backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, discounted cash flows, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, merger arbitrage, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, rolodex, short selling, side project, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, systematic trading, two and twenty, unpaid internship, value at risk, yield curve, yield management

As the market has grown, so too have fund sizes. 119 c10.indd 119 1/10/08 11:10:52 AM 120 Getting a Job in Hedge Funds By the end of 2006, the average size of a fund of hedge funds had reached $178 million, from $21 million in 2001, according to the 2007 Eureka Global Fund of Hedge Funds Directory. The Eureka survey also found that: • More than half (55%) of all fund of hedge funds have less than $100 million in AUM. • Fully 29% of all fund of hedge funds are based in the United States, and 24% are in the United Kingdom. Switzerland (17%), various offshore financial centers (14%), and France (5%) are the other leading domiciles for fund of funds. • Long/short equity funds account for one-third of the total, followed by multistrategy funds with 20%. • Emerging markets–focused funds are attracting the most new assets and have produced the best returns over the past five years. • About 60% of Asian fund of hedge funds are managed out of the United States and UK. • Over the past few years, fund of funds with more than $1 billion in assets have performed consistently better than their smaller peers. • Fees account for 22.5% of fund of funds returns, in contrast to absolute return funds, where fees represent less than 7% of the total.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

The third reason control frauds are so destructive is that they provide a “legitimate” way for the CEO to convert company assets to personal assets. All fraudsters have to balance the potential gains from fraud with the risks.2 The most efficient fraud mechanism for the CEO is to steal cash from the company, e.g., by wiring it to his account at an offshore bank. No S&L control fraud, and none of the ongoing huge frauds, did so. Stealing from the till in large amounts from a large company guarantees detection and makes the prosecutor’s task simple. The strategy could appeal only to those willing to live in hiding or in exile in a country without an extradition treaty.

Enron and its fellow conspirators (virtually every major energy trader in America and several electrical generators) caused blackouts in California, raised the price of electrical power dramatically, and bankrupted California’s electrical utilities. (These control frauds were aimed at customers, not creditors.) Similarly, corporate tax fraud surged as some of the nation’s top audit and law firms pushed fraudulent tax shelters and schemes for using tax havens to avoid taxation. Enron was so active in these frauds that it marketed its services as a consultant for eliminating corporate taxes. The indirect, nonfinancial impacts of the S&L control frauds cannot be quantified. One of these impacts is political scandal. The control frauds’ manipulation of Speaker Wright became widely known.


pages: 237 words: 69,985

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

The percentage of workers who are freelance instead of salaried grows annually. Real estate prices are prohibitive in any place with a strong labor market. Economic inequality is worse than ever in the modern era. To make matters worse, the greatest wealth now comes from the accumulation of invisible capital, not physical stuff: start-up equity, stock shares, and offshore bank accounts opened to avoid taxes. As the French economist Thomas Piketty points out, these immaterial possessions grow in value much faster than salaries do. That is, if you’re lucky enough to have a salary in the first place. Crisis following crisis; flexibility and mobility now feel safer than being static, another reason that owning less looks more and more attractive.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

SEZs represent a strategic option to escape histories of failure and, as China did, achieve in twenty years what took two hundred in the West. Mauritius, for example, used EPZs to graduate from agriculture to textiles and then investment zones and tax treaties to shift to financial services, which now make up more than 70 percent of its economy versus less than 5 percent for agriculture. By making itself Africa’s offshore financial hub, it is both a gateway for sizable pools of Asian investment into the continent and the source of 40 percent of the FDI that enters India. Not bad for a country whose sugar-driven economy of the 1960s generated a per capita income of $200.*1 FROM EXCLAVE TO ENCLAVE The NIC 2030 report actually used the wrong term for SEZs, referring to them as “enclaves.”

Leveraging the tax-free status and location inside America’s security perimeter, Puerto Rico’s massive new Port of the Americas will subsume the entire southern city of Ponce and allow for efficient transshipment of smaller cargoes up and down the entire East Coast as well. Puerto Rico has also become a favored American tax haven, changing its laws in 2013 to eliminate capital gains taxes to attract the investment of ultra-high-net-worth hedge fund managers such as John Paulson, who calls it the “Singapore of the Caribbean.”8 Just as Tennessee and Michigan compete for automotive assembly, America’s onshore is now competing with America’s offshore in ports, shipping, and finance as well.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Aurigny Air Services and Blue Islands fly from Bournemouth, Guernsey, Jersey and Southampton. Return to beginning of chapter JERSEY pop 88,200 Jersey is the biggest and, its rivals would say, the brashest of the Channel Islands. Shimmering steel and glass, and pinstripe suits, set the tone in capital St Helier, an offshore finance centre. However, the island is much more than that, and many visitors prefer to stay in the harbour village of St Aubin. Here, contemporary affluence mixes happily with nautical charm, with cobbled streets climbing the hill from the boat masts. The coast is 48 miles long; exquisite sandy beaches fringe the south, east and west sides, and rugged cliffs frame the north.

* * * HIGHLIGHTS Imagining yourself a member of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five on twee, carefree Sark Exploring the 13th-century Castle Cornet in Guernsey’s hilly St Peter Port Following in the paw prints of Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt’s extinct wallabies, among neolithic tombs on the cobweb-banishing common on Herm Discovering another side to a renowned offshore banking centre on Jersey’s laid-back west coast at St Ouen’s Bay Gazing at swaying sailboats from a half-timbered hotel in Jersey’s St Aubin (opposite) Catching a dinky passenger plane to distinctive Alderney, where seabirds nest in Nazi lookout towers POPULATION: 151,562 AREA: 120 SQ MILES AS WELL AS ENGLISH, TWO FRENCH DIALECTS ARE SPOKEN ON THE CHANNEL ISLANDS: JÈRRIAIS AND GUERN2 ÉSIAIS * * * History The Channel Islands are rich in archaeological sites from the Stone Age onwards.

For centuries the islands were used as sparring grounds, but in 1483 England and France agreed that the territory would remain neutral in the event of war. In WWII, these happy-go-lucky resorts became the only British soil to be occupied by German forces. The postwar years have seen the fishing, tourism and farming industries decrease, to be replaced by the big bucks of offshore banking. Today the finance sector employs the biggest chunk of the workforce. Getting There & Away Return flights to Jersey and Guernsey, the main points of entry, vary wildly between £70 and £300 – shop around. JERSEY Condor Ferries ( 01534-872240; www.condorferries.com) sails from Guernsey (from 55 minutes), Poole (four hours), Portsmouth (10 hours), St Malo, France (1¼ hours) and Weymouth (3½ hours).


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

The relevance of the rise of the neoliberal globalized financial regime to the crisis is a matter of great concern to the thought collective and to others (such as Ben Bernanke) who seek to offload responsibility for the crash onto someone else. Because there was no obvious watershed linking policy to theory comparable to Bretton Woods, and the post-1980 infrastructure of international finance grew up piecemeal, the relationship between neoliberalism and the growth of shadow and offshore banking is only beginning to be a subject of interest. Evidence, by construction, is often inaccessible. However, the drive to offshore outsource manufacturing in the advanced economies, which was mutually symbiotic with the frustration of capital controls, was clearly a function of neoliberal doctrines concerning the unbounded benefits of freedom of international trade, combined with neoliberal projects to reengineer the corporation as an arbitrary nexus of contractual obligations, rather than as a repository of production expertise.

“The Role of the Category of Ignorance in Sociological Theory,” American Sociological Review 27 (1962): 492–508. Schulman, Bruce, and Julian Zelizer, eds. Rightward Bound (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). Sent, Esther-Mirjam. The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Shaxson, Nicholas. Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Shearmur, Jeremy. Hayek and After (London: Routledge, 1996). Sheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Loic Wacquant, eds. Commodifying Bodies (London: Sage, 2002). Sherden, William. The Fortune Sellers (New York: Wiley, 1998). Sherman, Gabriel. “Revolver,” New York, April 2011, at http://nymag.com/news/business/wallstreet/peter-orszag-2011-4/index6.html.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Large US multinationals were among the most important depositors in the New York money market. It was only natural, therefore, that the largest among New York’s banks would promptly enter the Eurodollar market, not just to take advantage of the lower costs and greater freedom of action afforded by offshore banking, but also to avoid major losses in deposits. And so they did, controlling a 50 per cent share of the Eurodollar business by 1961 (de Cecco 1982: 1 1). An organizational structure thus developed which for all practical purposes was beyond the control of the system of central banks that regulated the supply of world money in accordance with the regime of fixed exchange rates established at Bretton Woods.

.&”’ if” Ol1L11L1J1JL1L1L11111411l 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 Year Source: Wa|ter(l99l: 167, 182). 4.2 US Gold Reserves and Short-term Liabilities, 1950-72 312 THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY putting restrictions on US foreign lending and investment. Total US liabilities to “foreigners” — a non-negligible but unknown share of which no doubt consisted of dollar balances held by US corporations in foreign and offshore banks — was already beginning to exceed US gold reserves in the late 1950s. But around 1963, as figure 4.2 Sl‘1OWS, US gold reserves began falling short even of what was due to foreign monetary authorities and governments — a more serious matter because it impinged directly on intergovernmental power relations.


pages: 252 words: 75,349

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

Unknown hackers or ChronoPay insiders had leaked huge caches of his firm’s internal correspondence—tens of thousands of emails and accounting documents—as well as hundreds of hours of phone conversations that Vrublevsky recorded with others. The information painstakingly documented the breadth of ChronoPay’s involvement in the rogue pharmacy and fake antivirus business endeavors. These required the creation of an elaborate network of shell companies and offshore bank accounts—all documented in well-organized Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and in some cases described in Vrublevsky’s own voice. This cache of purloined documents contained not only evidence of wrongdoing by ChronoPay and its executives, but also intricate, sometimes lurid details about some of the most powerful people in the cybercrime underground.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

Now, suddenly, Bagehot’s key notion that banking markets can only be stabilized by a ‘‘lender of last resort’’—a central bank or the equivalent in a clearing house—has come home. The global ‘‘financial economy’’ has become, over a generation, vastly greater in size than even the largest economies like the United States and Japan. Nobody has the resources to stop a panic in the classic sense, least of all the offshore banking centers. Since their birth, the Euromarkets have grown much faster than both the ‘‘real’’ global economy and the financial economy of individual states. This swelling of the sheer scale of the global financial economy was possible because banking in the Euromarkets gradually became almost purely concerned with trading in financial instruments unlinked to the real economy of buying and selling stuff.


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

In patronage systems, as in healthy modern governments (p. 212), resources are drawn from the population to the center, but then are largely distributed back downward within the system, in the form of patronage, or else infrastructure, public services, decent salaries for public officials, and so on. In today’s Afghanistan, the money is moving upward within the system and is largely sent outside Afghanistan altogether. (“Dubai” is a placeholder for offshore financial havens.) The revenue streams captured are listed on the top left. In return, the government provides free rein (“permission” ) to extract resources, protection from repercussion, and punishment of officials with too much integrity. The bounceback arrow on the top right represents the contractors’ profits and other overhead spending that never reaches Afghanistan at all.


pages: 264 words: 79,589

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Apple II, Brian Krebs, Burning Man, corporate governance, dumpster diving, Exxon Valdez, fake news, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, McMansion, Mercator projection, offshore financial centre, packet switching, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, traffic fines, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zipcar

Norminton made it clear that he saw real potential in Max, and the pair took to walking the yard every day, swapping war stories and fantasizing about how they might work together when they hit the streets. With Norminton’s guidance, Max could easily learn to crack brokerage houses, where they’d tap into overstuffed trading accounts and drain them into offshore banks. One big haul and they’d have enough cash for the rest of their lives. After five months, Norminton and his schemes were sent home to sunny Orange County, California, while Max remained at Taft with another year left on his sentence—long, tedious days of bad food, standing for count, and the sound of chains and keys.


pages: 299 words: 83,854

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy by Howard Karger

Alan Greenspan, big-box store, blue-collar work, book value, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, delayed gratification, financial deregulation, fixed income, illegal immigration, independent contractor, labor-force participation, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microcredit, mortgage debt, negative equity, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, predatory finance, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, underbanked, working poor

The Internet has created a new playing field by enabling fringe corporations to skip over state commercial barriers, thereby providing fresh opportunities to circumvent usury laws. In fact, the Internet has allowed payday lenders, fringe mortgage lenders, and predatory credit card companies to operate not only outside of state laws, but sometimes even outside of U.S. borders. For example, payday lenders can use electronic transfers to send cash to borrowers through offshore banks. State commercial barriers are being broken down in all areas, including credit cards. For example, consumers no longer have to apply for credit cards at local banks; instead, they can apply online to almost any bank in the United States. Some fringe lenders in states with strict usury laws have installed Internet kiosks that allow customers to apply for loans in states with liberal or no interest caps.


pages: 291 words: 85,822

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

He liked the stability of great wealth. He particularly liked institutions, like charities and massive-scale pension funds, because they were so much less likely to ever withdraw their initial capital.23 As a result, his Pyramid included millionaires, billionaires, movie stars, captains of industry, and a lot of other people with offshore bank accounts. Suffice it to say, when his Pyramid crumbled, we all heard about it. To catch a big fish, you need the right bait: the way he caught these big fish was with each other. Just the sheer sums of money and name recognition of his existing clients were enough to reassure his new investors that this was a real investment, and a really good one.


pages: 1,202 words: 424,886

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Countries in such a predicament have to worry about the possibility of litigation arising from investors’ attempts to buy sovereign debt at low prices in hopes of litigating their way into a seizure of the sovereign assets.5 5 Robert McCauley, “Distinguishing Global Dollar Reserves from Official Holdings in the United States,” BIS Quarterly Review, September 2005. FIGURE 20.4 In 2003–2004, offshore deposits surged and were invested with a lag in Japanese foreign exchange reserves, securities holdings, and offshore bank deposits (in billions of U.S. dollars) Discovery Process There have been times when rapid accumulations of dollars did not translate immediately into concomitant increases in holdings of domestic assets. One glaring example is the rapid accumulation of dollar reserves that Japan saw from 2003 to 2004.

One glaring example is the rapid accumulation of dollar reserves that Japan saw from 2003 to 2004. During this period, Japan was intervening heavily in the foreign exchange market, buying dollars in exchange for yen, in an effort to protect its export sector from the negative effects of the weakening of the value of the U.S. dollar. Initially, the intervention caused a spike in offshore bank deposits, but the funds were eventually withdrawn to purchase securities (Figure 20.4). When countries face rapid influxes of dollars, for a variety of reasons they may delay investing those assets. Reasons could include considerations for the optimal timing of new investments and preferences for newly issued securities.6 REVIEW IN BRIEF • A certificate of deposit is a negotiable instrument representative of a time deposit made with a bank at a fixed rate of interest for a fixed period. 6 Ibid., p. 12

For depositors, one attraction of IBFs is that any interest they pay to foreigners is exempt from withholding taxes; another advantage is that the depositor will get U.S., as opposed to U.K., Japan, or some other, sovereign risk. U.S. sovereign risk won’t attract rogue depositors, but it should attract institutions that are loath to place funds in the shell branches that major U.S. banks have opened in the Caribbean banking centers and other tax havens because they don’t like the sovereign risk that they perceive attaches to deposits there. The origin of IBFs goes back to the days when New York City was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. At the time, the state and the city zeroed in on the banks as the culprits. The city’s problems were the banks’ fault because the banks kept selling the city’s debt whereas they should have told the city it was bankrupt.


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

The only major destinations for investment in the BRI neighbourhood are Russia, Indonesia and Kazakhstan. The other major destinations for Chinese investment abroad comprise OECD countries with large markets and sophisticated technologies, such as the US, Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada and also offshore financial centres in the Caribbean, used as financial and fiscal conduits. These aside, much Chinese direct investment abroad has been undertaken in search of raw materials and energy, in countries such as Venezuela, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As of the start of 2016, BRI countries accounted for 17 per cent of the stock of Chinese investment, and in 2016, China announced that 8.5 per cent of direct investment that year had gone to these states.9 Similarly, the lending abroad by China’s policy banks is overwhelmingly to non-BRI countries.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

The roots of the transformation of finance are to be found in the deregulation of the industry and the liberalization of domestic and international financial transactions throughout the 1980s and 1990s, first in the US and the UK, then, gradually, in most of the world.126 The process culminated in November 1999 when President Clinton abolished the institutional barriers to consolidation between different segments of the finance industry legislated in the 1930s and 1940s to prevent the kind of financial crises that led to the Great Depression of 1929. From 2000 onwards, banks, securities firms, and insurance companies in the United States can operate jointly or even merge operations in a single financial firm. For a number of years, the proliferation of offshore banking and investment firms, for instance hedge funds, had already bypassed many of the financial constraints. And mega-mergers, such as the one between CitiCorp and Travelers, had made a mockery of regulations. Yet, by making official the hands-off policy of the federal regulator, the US signaled the freedom for private companies to manage money and securities in any way the market would bear, with no other limits than those established by the law and the courts relating to trade in general.

O’Brien, Richard occupational categories occupational structure; class relations; education; employment; post-industrialism O’Connor, David OECD; Employment Outlook OECD countries: employment; exports; FDI; ILO research; inflation; Internet use; job creation; multinational corporations; productivity; R&D; trade in services office architecture, Shaw, D. E. & Co. office work offshore banking offshore production Ohmae, Kenichi oil prices on-line community on-line games on-line journalism on-line shopping on-line teaching on-line trading Opium Wars opto-electronics Oracle organizational transformation: capitalism; firms; flexibility; information technologies; innovation; networking; production; shift in mentality; technological development Osaka declaration Osiris Therapeutics Osterman, Paul other, the outsourcing outwork Owen, Bruce M.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Hastings and Lackey, however, had perfect timing. In 1999, Prince Roy was battling Alzheimer’s and his health was deteriorating. The “royal” family considered leaving Sealand, making it available for other uses. In November that year, Hastings visited the platform for the first time. He already had experience in offshore financing and online gambling in Anguilla, where he had met Lackey. After inspecting Sealand that November, the entrepreneurs were inspired. They decided to move forward. “The biggest inspiration was Vernor Vinge, True Names,” recalled Lackey.92 The vision was to have individuals acting in the Other Plane, able to “live on hardware and transact stuff on their own and not have to be under any government,” Lackey recounted later in Palo Alto.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

They used their shares as collateral to borrow extensively from each other and then used these loans to finance the purchase of additional shares from the three banks, thus increasing the price of their shares and boosting their balance sheets. Furthermore, they plotted together to broaden the scope of their speculative operations on a global scale. Their fraudulent schemes were disguised through a web of jointly owned firms headquartered in offshore banking locations, such as the Isle of Man, the Virgin Islands, Cuba, and Luxembourg. Bank customers were persuaded to increase their debt, converting it into lower interest Swiss francs or Japanese yen. Unlimited credit permitted people to engage in unlimited consumption, artificially stimulating domestic demand and propelling economic growth.


pages: 279 words: 90,278

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

call centre, financial independence, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, late fees, Mason jar, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor

The difference was that we stood to pay more for our errors than did wealthier Americans who made the same mistakes. If you work every day and still can’t afford what you need, is it worse to steal a little from a big store owned by billionaires than to be a billionaire who underpays his employees? Is it worse to do business under the table with a couple hundred bucks than to keep millions of dollars in an offshore bank? Is a poor alcoholic worse than a rich one? Is a poor gambler worse than a rich one? Is a poor teenager who gets knocked up more irresponsible than a rich one? On that last point, as a young girl I gleaned from cultural attitudes that the answer was yes. While it was locally accepted, to some extent, broader society hated the idea of a girl like me getting pregnant.


pages: 333 words: 86,662

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, cotton gin, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, informal economy, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, jitney, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, rolodex, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Y2K

Starlitz reached into his lime-green waistcoat pocket, and came out with a gold plastic rectangle. “Because cash is yesterday. Customs people are very down on cash now. So instead I brought you this handy Visa card. It’s made out in your favorite name. With a twenty-thousand-dollar line of credit from an offshore bank in Turkish Cyprus.” Wiesel reached out reflexively, then restrained himself. “How do I know that’s true?” “You can call their toll-free number, pal. It’s printed here on the back of the card. Cyprus is a Commonwealth country, so Cypriot bankers always speak great English. You can call the bank first thing, from the suite that I booked you at the Istanbul Pera Palace.”


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

This boosted a sector that already possessed a number of important strengths: a large pool of British-based multinationals, established roles in shipping and insurance, and an enduring reputation for expertise and dependability (Budd and Whimster, 1992). London therefore began to function as a proficient offshore banking centre for dollar deposits. From 1974, antagonism against the new Labour government generated unprecedented discontent and distrust within the City about the capacity of government policy to create prosperity or financial stability. Specialist government bodies such as the Monopolies Commission and the Restrictive Practices Court began to cooperate with the Bank of England to overcome anti-competitive practices in banks and charges at the Stock Exchange that had mostly been in place since the war (Michie, 2004: 49–51).


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

The proportion of the population below the poverty line fell from 60 percent in 1970 to 11 percent in 1996. In 1997, just a year before Suharto’s fall from power, the United Nations honored him for his success in reducing poverty. Meanwhile, Suharto’s family and cronies became immensely wealthy, allegedly siphoning billions of dollars into offshore bank accounts. Suharto’s government was like “a monarchy, with a king whose authority has never been questioned, and whose children believe their wealth is God-given,” according to a Western ambassador. Estimates of the Suharto family fortune range from $15 billion to $45 billion. The Suharto family influence reached far and wide.


pages: 308 words: 96,604

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", airport security, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Mason jar, McMansion, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, tech billionaire

Chris agreed to meet, more interested in picking the guy’s brain than really working with him. Chris met the investigator at the Moonlite Diner, a chrome 50s-style restaurant two miles east of the new clinic location. At the restaurant, the fast-talking investigator drank coffee and explained how it was done. He’d help Chris establish an account at an offshore bank, maybe in the Cayman Islands, and take the cash there. He’d done it before, he said. Once he’d walked into a bank on Grand Cayman with $7 million in Colombian drug cash, and no one blinked an eye. The going rate was six points, the PI said, but the price was negotiable. Chris was less worried about the rate than the idea of just handing over hundreds of thousands to someone.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out. Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good. Diverting the public’s attention from an issue like offshore banking worsens the big problems, even as these MarketWorlders shower attention on niche causes. As life expectancy declined among large subpopulations of Americans, winners possessed of a sense of having arrived might have chipped in. They might have taken an interest in the details of a health care system that was allowing the unusual phenomenon of a developed country regressing in this way, or in the persistence of easily preventable deaths in the developing world.


The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean

Donald Trump, financial independence, index card, Joan Didion, new economy, offshore financial centre, Richard Bolles, Suez canal 1869, traveling salesman, tulip mania

The next year Leonard Rosen sold Gulf American to a Pennsylvania finance company called GAC Corporation; he and his brother each received stock in GAC worth $63 million. Leonard eventually started up another land company that marketed desert wasteland in Nevada to German investors. In 1977 he was indicted for tax fraud, and a grand jury investigated secret offshore bank accounts that he controlled; he pleaded no contest and received a $5,000 fine and three years’ probation. GAC had given the Rosens stock worth almost $ 115 million in exchange for Gulf American. GAC marketed the Gulf American property until 1975. By then GAC was $350 million in debt. The subsequent bankruptcy took thirteen years to settle and is considered the biggest and most complex reorganization in Florida’s corporate history, involving more than nine thousand creditors, twenty-seven thousand lot owners, and five hundred thousand acres of land.


The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Just when Italy’s democratic institutions were in grave peril, and trust in those institutions had plummeted, Gelli chose to ignore Masonry’s time-hallowed aversion to ‘politicks’, its loyalty to the governing institutions, and to make murky allusions to burning democracy. The Brotherhood had rarely appeared more sinister. Within months of Gelli’s notorious Corriere della Sera interview, the true face of P2 began to emerge during the investigation into Michele Sindona, a Sicilian tax lawyer who owned a complex web of banks and offshore finance companies. When the fortunes of his empire became precarious, Sindona took more risks in currency speculation and upped his ambitions. In 1972, despite rumours that he had links to the mafia, he acquired a controlling share of the Franklin National Bank, then the twentieth biggest bank in the United States.


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

These sell-offs forced many countries to devalue their currencies by lowering their official exchange rate against the dollar, an action that effectively made the local currency worth less by weakening its global purchasing power. This in turn caused local prices to skyrocket which decreased the value of money held in savings accounts. Whenever this scenario played out, the citizens of these countries—especially the poor and middle class, who seldom had access to offshore banking options—were always hit the hardest. If PayPal could find a way to empower these people to move and transfer money with the click of a mouse, then we would indeed be on the verge of creating something far more revolutionary than just a new way to split up dinner bills. As the use of the Internet spread, even the lower classes could theoretically whisk their money away to safety by exchanging it for a more stable foreign currency and storing it far away from the reach of their own floundering governments.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Many of those who started Russian banks were gangsters of the vorovskoi mir—“thieves’ world,” also known as the Russian Mafiya. In July 1998, the International Monetary Fund made a $17 billion loan package to Russian banks. It has been reported that about $4.5 billion of this money was quickly wired to mobsters’ offshore bank accounts. The thug-controlled banks had no intention of repaying many of the Western loans. The Russian treasury was scarcely more credit-worthy. The U.S. Treasury has such a flawless credit record that economists often fall into the error of identifying its bonds with the “risk-free” investment of theory.


pages: 459 words: 109,490

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company, Timothy McVeigh

With its far-flung business interests and scattered aircraft fleet on several continents, Bout’s network was a post-Cold War phenomenon, operating with clandestine ties to numerous governments but beholden to none. Its hidden structure was comparable to Latin America’s drug cartels, with their offshore bank accounts, small fleets of drug-carrying planes, and highly mobile legions of smugglers stationed from Medellín to Miami. But where cocaine-ferrying organizations were flagrant criminal enterprises, the international legal status of Bout’s arms deliveries remained murkier—and there was no certainty that any other nation possessed the political will to shut down his organization.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

“You mentioned to me this idea that in Iceland we should become a vanguard of publishing freedom,” Helgason, a cheery round man with blond curls said to the pair of WikiLeakers in their on-camera interview. “Absolutely, absolutely,” Assange responded. “We see in the Caribbean Islands and the Cayman Islands that politicians create laws to enable offshore financial institutions to hide the assets of the developing and the developed world,” he said. Iceland could pull off the opposite trick, he argued: transforming itself into an island where nothing is hidden. He went on to list the world’s most liberal freedom-of-information and media laws from Sweden to Georgia.


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Nevertheless, such tax systems are sometimes ‘imposed as conditions on developing countries by international financial institutions’.34 In a parallel to UK tax giveaways that outpace its spending cuts, the IMF estimates that developing countries lose $212 billion per year from tax-avoidance schemes, which far outstrips the amount they receive in aid.35 Over a third of the world’s total unrecorded offshore financial wealth is thought to be secretly held in Switzerland, which recently faced questions from the UN ‘over the toll that its tax and financial secrecy policies take on women’s rights across the globe’.36 A 2016 analysis by the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) found that the amount of money lost to tax dodging by multinational copper firms such as the Swiss-headquartered Glencore in Zambia, could finance 60% of the country’s health budget.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Openness, on the other hand, introduces new challenges for this movement of truth-seekers, from Assange’s perspective. “When things become more open, then they start to become more complex, because people start hiding what they’re doing—their bad behavior—through complexity,” he said. He pointed to bureaucratic doublespeak and the offshore financial sector as clear examples. These systems are technically open, he said, but in fact are impenetrable; they are hard to attack but even harder to use efficiently. Obfuscation at this level, where the complexity is legal but still covering something up, is a much more difficult problem to solve than straightforward censorship.


pages: 399 words: 114,787

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

It wouldn’t be until October 2014—after prodding from the Kremlin, which was trying to halt an exodus of cash from the country—that Deutsche’s headquarters would realize that there was a massive Russian money-laundering scheme operating out of its Moscow outpost, with a helping hand, perhaps unwitting, from the bank’s London and New York offices. A year after Hellenic Bank had first flagged the suspicious transactions, Deutsche alerted regulators in multiple countries to what it had uncovered. Government investigations were launched in the United States and Britain, and they eventually would find that Wiz’s wife had offshore bank accounts with what looked like millions of dollars she had received from Russians, at least some of which had originated with the bank’s mirror-trading clients and paid to her via DBTCA. (Wiz also sometimes received bags of cash.) Broeksmit’s concerns about DBTCA’s laxity were proving prescient.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And who we are today is infinitely more important than how our lives might be seen in retrospect. Yet there is something immediately recognisable in the idea that, ultimately, we can’t take it all with us. The story of our lives, as seen in the round, will not be a record of all the stuff we momentarily enjoyed and ultimately threw away. Nor even of the wealth we managed to accumulate in offshore bank accounts. Neither will it simply be a sum of momentary pleasures.10 Rather, the good life is something in which we must invest (to use an economic term) both at the personal and at the societal level. The consumer society may have raised instant gratification to the status of a social good. But the wisdom of ages has always recognised that deeper instincts drive the human psyche and occasionally draw out what might legitimately be called the best in us.


Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide by Martin S. Fridson, Fernando Alvarez

Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, corporate governance, credit crunch, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fixed income, information trail, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, offshore financial centre, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, speech recognition, statistical model, stock buybacks, the long tail, time value of money, transaction costs, Y2K, zero-coupon bond

It also emerged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into the suicide of William Massey Jr., who managed an umbrella company for Scrushy's personal businesses. Two months before taking his own life, Massey made a hasty business trip to the Bahamas. The FBI suspected Scrushy of setting up offshore bank accounts as a tax dodge. On November 4, 2003, federal prosecutors charged Richard Scrushy with 85 charges related to a false accounting scheme, including conspiracy, securities fraud, mail and wire fraud, and money laundering. Perjury and obstruction of justice were added the following year, when a revised indictment consolidated the charges into a total of 58.


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

My internet searches for the shipping companies that operate out of here ran constantly up against a tide of adverts for young brides and the promises of a lonely heart being filled. But love was not the only relationship that flourished here. Everywhere you saw signs of the coming-together of business and trade. Above the airport’s passport control were three adverts for freight service companies, one showing a lorry fitted with aircraft wings. Others highlighted offshore financial services. Speed and discretion were the key offerings here. Once it was grain merchants that had made Odessa the fourth-richest city in the Russian Empire. Now its exports had diversified. Women and guns were new lures that hooked people here. I smiled at the posing bride and walked down to the docks.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

While corporate power and its ethos are incorporated into the structure of the state,20 the patriotism, nationalism, and unblinking loyalty of the citizenry connect the constitution for preservation to the constitution for increase. That role becomes all the more important as it becomes clearer that globalizing, multinational capitalism has no political loyalties as such. It loves offshore bank accounts as much as it loves producing cars in China, where it can pay workers a monthly wage of sixty dollars.21 Through the convergence of these developments Americans are being successfully “kneaded” into a citizenry less suited to democratic demands and increasingly more accepting and supportive of the dominant forms of power, not out of Nazi enthusiasm, but from fear and misguided patriotism.


pages: 414 words: 123,666

Merchants' War by Stross, Charles

British Empire, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, East Village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, operational security, packet switching, peak oil, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh

You may be interested to know that your story checks out: that is, Beckstein's mother disappeared six months ago. Her house is still there, the bills are being paid on time, but there's nobody home. We haven't gotten a trace on her income stream so far; her credit cards and bank account are ordinary enough, but the deposits are coming in from an offshore bank account in Liechtenstein and that's turning out to be hard to trace. Anyway, I think we can confirm that she's one of them." He stood up again and paced over to the kitchen door then back, as if his legs were incapable of standing still. "This is a, a tactical mess. We'd hoped to get at least a few successful contacts in place before our ability to operate in fairyland was blown.


pages: 509 words: 137,315

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

The Sovs still have hard-currency problems, but we can cut a good countertrade in natural gas. Kuwaiti housing project: no. Islamic Republic: the terms are good but it stinks politically. No.” She paused. “Now here’s one you didn’t know about. Grenada United Bank. The Committee’s slipping this one in.” For the first time, Emily looked uneasy. “They’re an offshore bank. Not too savory. But the Committee figures it’s time for a gesture of friendship. It won’t do our reputation much good if the whole thing is hashed out in public. But it’s harmless enough—we can let it go.” Emily yanked open a wooden drawer with a squeak and put the Report away. “So much for this quarter.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The money is in these so-called offshore accounts not because the climate in the Cayman Islands is more conducive to banking; money goes there precisely because of the opportunities it affords for avoiding taxes, laws, and regulations. The existence of these opportunities is not an accidental loophole. The secrecy of the offshore banking centers exists because it is in the interests of certain groups in the advanced industrial countries. There was an accord among the advanced industrial countries to do something about bank secrecy, but in August 2001 the Bush administration vetoed it. Then, when it was discovered that bank secrecy had been used to finance the terrorists involved in the September 11 attacks, the United States changed its views—but only where fighting terrorism was involved.


pages: 510 words: 141,188

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Frances Oldham Kelsey, global pandemic, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

I am indebted to Mark Lee Hunter of Story-Based Inquiry Associates for his advice on how to turn years of reporting and mountains of information into an actual story, at a moment when I felt stuck. At the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), deputy director Marina Walker Guevara generously allowed access to the offshore banking records of the Panama and Paradise papers, while Emilia Diaz Struck patiently provided instructions on how to navigate within the records. At the Freedom of the Press Foundation, director of newsroom digital security Harlo Holmes and digital security trainer Olivia Martin offered valuable guidance on digital file encryption, risk assessment, and secure communication with sources.


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Justice Department memorandum says that much of Obiang’s wealth has come “from extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct.” The Times reported that during one twelve-month period ending in April 2006, Obiang “funneled at least $73 million into the United States, using shell corporations and offshore bank accounts to launder the money and ultimately buy his Malibu estate and a luxury jet.”5 Obviously, the environmental and societal ills caused by petroleum cannot be denied. Oil is not a perfect fuel. There is no such thing. But oil is—in nearly every case—greener than any of the alternative energy forms that might replace it.


pages: 506 words: 132,373

The Good, the Bad and the History by Jodi Taylor

friendly fire, global pandemic, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, place-making, urban sprawl

During our twelve-­hour absence he’d put on a little weight and lost the grey-­corpse look that had actually, as I had informed him, suited him so well. Now he was tanned and clear-­eyed. ‘I have just returned from three weeks in Monaco, my lady. At the tables. I am pleased to report that, should we ever require them, several offshore bank accounts have been opened and some very healthy sums deposited therein. The usual password.’ ‘You took a holiday?’ I said, grinning. He addressed Lady Amelia but his words were for me. ‘The thought of Dr Maxwell’s continuing ministrations was all it took to get me back on my feet again, my lady.’


Frommer's Caribbean 2010 by Christina Paulette Colón, Alexis Lipsitz Flippin, Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince, John Marino

cotton gin, European colonialism, haute cuisine, hydroponic farming, jitney, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, Saturday Night Live, Skype, sustainable-tourism, white picket fence, young professional

Amenities: Restaurant; self-service bar; complimentary transport; babysitting; nature trails; 2 tennis courts; fishing; kayaks; sailboats; snorkeling; water-skiing; windsurfing. In room: Ceiling fan, Wi-Fi, no phone. G UA N A I S L A N D 8 The Cayman Islands You are likely to find a lot of mil- lionaires r unning ar ound the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Dependent Territory lying 773km (479 miles) due south of Miami. It’s an offshore banking mecca, and G rand Cayman is a hav en for some shady dough. For that r eason, and because vir tually everything has to be impor ted, the cost of living her e is about 20% higher than in the U nited S tates. The Cayman dollar is even more valuable than the U.S. dollar. Seven Mile Beach and several dive spots have put G rand Cayman on the tourist map.

G R A N D C AYM A N 9 2 G R A N D C AYM A N The largest of the thr ee islands and a r eal diving mecca, G rand Cayman sur vives and flourishes thanks to a unique blend of tourism, financial ser vices, low crime, conser vatism, and political stability . Home to the branch offices of mor e than 500 banks and dozens of insurance companies, its capital, G eorge Town, is the offshore banking center of the Caribbean. (No problems finding an ATM here!) Retirees are drawn to the peace and tranquillity of this B ritish C rown Colony, site of many large-scale r eal estate and condominium developments. The overwhelming majority of the Cayman Islands’ population liv es on G rand Cayman.

It also has a reputation as being a money-laundering hav en for dr ug traffickers and other suspicious businesses (despite adamant denials b y Nevis officials). The tiny island has some 9,000 offshor e businesses—about one business per inhabitant—r egistered and operating under strict secrecy laws. In fact, disagreements about controls over offshore banking activities trigger ed a rift betw een the two islands that almost led to N evis’s secession. I n the most r ecent r eferendum on the issue, in 1998, a majority of N evisians (but not the two-thir ds r equired) voted for independence from St. Kitts. • Brimstone Hill Fortress, S t. Kitts, which commands a vie w of six islands: N evis, Montserrat, Saba, Statia, St.


pages: 433 words: 53,078

Be Your Own Financial Adviser: The Comprehensive Guide to Wealth and Financial Planning by Jonquil Lowe

AltaVista, asset allocation, banking crisis, BRICs, buy and hold, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, fixed income, high net worth, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, place-making, Right to Buy, risk/return, short selling, zero-coupon bond

Therefore, after the end of the tax year, Sarah completes form R40 to claim back the tax deducted from her £173 share of the net interest. Including tax at 20 per cent, this is equivalent to gross interest of £216.25, so she gets a tax refund of £216.25 – £173 = £43.25. Savings income paid gross More unusually, savings income may be paid gross to all savers. This applies, for example, to most accounts you have with offshore banks. Although the interest is paid gross, as a UK resident, you are nevertheless liable for tax and should declare this income to the Revenue. Savings accounts and income bonds from NS&I pay gross interest. If you are a non-taxpayer, it is convenient to receive interest gross because it saves you claiming tax back.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

The Sovereign Individual, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, makes the same argument by pointing out that technology is reducing the ability of government to enforce its power and control. The overhead cost of the modern industrial state will no longer be supported when people find ways to escape it. Wriston has supported efforts to transform offshore banking havens into high-tech sanctuaries, masking cybercommerce from national taxing authorities. Taking a slightly different approach to the same notion, David Post and David Johnson, codirectors of the Cyberspace Law Institute, have proposed that cyberspace should be a separate legal jurisdiction with its own laws and regulations, created and enforced by the online community.


pages: 507 words: 145,878

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders by Connie Bruck

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

There were the players who had turned nondescript or failing financial companies into dazzling success stories, based on the yield of the bonds that Milken offered them. And there were the money managers—people who ran investment portfolios for thrift institutions, insurance companies, public and private pension funds, mutual funds, offshore banks, college endowments, high-yield funds. Many of them had been converted into believers by Milken back in the seventies, when he had begun tirelessly preaching an esoteric gospel: that in a diversified portfolio of high-yield bonds, otherwise known as “junk” bonds, the reward outweighs the risk.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

Immediately there is a clear difference here between an accounting item and writing that big cheque. What happens if I simply don’t pay back all the liabilities? Let’s just start with stiffing the foreigners. According to the BIS data, foreign bankers have lent US$389bn to Asia and that does not include any sums accessed through the offshore banking sectors of Singapore and Hong Kong. Well, even if we pay back the local bankers in full, but get the foreigners to take 60¢ on the US dollar, the size of the financial hole has just shrunk by US$155bn to US$94bn. Anybody who thinks that the foreign bankers are getting out of Asia with 100¢ on the dollar following an 80% fall in collateral values in US dollar terms should seek investment guidance from Enid Blyton.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

(d) Make it more difficult for banks to engage in predatory lending and abusive credit card practices, including by putting stricter limits on usury (excessively high interest rates). (e) Curb the bonuses that encourage excessive risk taking and shortsighted behavior. (f) Close down the offshore banking centers (and their onshore counterparts) that have been so successful both at circumventing regulations and at promoting tax evasion and avoidance. There is no good reason that so much finance goes on in the Cayman Islands; there is nothing about it or its climate that makes it so conducive to banking.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

As the list of banned terms updates in real time, events that happen on the rest of the worldwide web simply never occur inside China. In 2016, for instance, the so-called Panama Papers were dumped online and quickly propelled to virality. The documents contained 2.6 terabytes of once-secret information on offshore bank accounts used by global elites to hide their money—a powerful instance of the internet’s radical transparency in action. Among the disclosures were rec-ords showing that the families of eight senior CCP leaders, including the brother-in-law of President Xi Jinping, were funneling tens of millions of dollars out of China through offshore shell companies.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

., clearance and settling] but nobody can drive it on the highway that’s already built.’ ”91 Despite SWIFT’s attempt to disincentivize the creation of an alternative highway, China’s desire to develop it remains. As one person involved with CIPS noted, the system was launched without all these features but there was “ambition” for more: “[CIPS] doesn’t include a lot of things [yet], but there is pressure for delivery.”92 Eventually, the system is intended to “allow offshore banks to participate, enabling offshore-to-offshore renminbi payments as well as those in and out of China.”93 This would make CIPS a wholly independent financial infrastructure and provide any two parties anywhere in the world a method for messaging, clearance, and settlement entirely free from US review, which would seriously undermine US financial power worldwide.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

In 2016 Russia’s influence operation stood out for its brazenness. Social media posts were written in broken English. Facebook ads were paid out in rubles, and self-proclaimed Texas secessionists and Black Lives Matter protesters logged into servers from Red Square. Now Russians were setting up offshore bank accounts, paying real Facebook users to rent their accounts, and obscuring their real locations using Tor, the anonymizing software. Inside IRA headquarters in Saint Petersburg, Russian trolls had far greater command of America’s politics. They switched out obvious Russian bots for human-scripted chatbots that searched for keywords in discussions and chimed in with incendiary scripted responses.


pages: 845 words: 197,050

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

And once customers were assured of this, Minin passed along the prices for purchases and shipment, arranged transit, and ensured that each party at each leg had the necessary paperwork to present to the authorities, such as they were, to stamp, sign, or seal. All that was required was money, and contacts, and a willingness to break the law. Once the payments from Africa were posted in his offshore bank accounts, Minin dispatched planeloads of Ukraine’s weapons—made for the Cold War, cached in European bunkers, marooned by the Soviet collapse, and tended by government officials both incompetent and criminal—on their journey to Africa, thereby moving guns from a northern Cold War front to the postcolonial power struggles to the south.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Far from being mutually exclusive, as mainstream thinking about the economy suggests, states and markets are part of the same basic configuration; they form an “ambiguous unity” (Hart 1986: 638). The relatively short-lived predominance of nation-states in the production and management of currency is giving way to a phase where money markets, offshore banking, and electronic payment systems are undermining the monetary sovereignty of nation-states (Hart 2001: 235). Money is as plural and dynamic today as it has ever been: “The money form is not standing still” (Hart 2001: 237). What distinguishes Hart’s approach is that it deals not with the difficulties that the erosion of state fiat money presents to governments but rather with the opportunities it presents to everyone else.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Globalization has been called the “twilight of sovereignty.”37 This is surely an exaggeration, but technology and increased mobility have made it much harder for states to enforce laws on their own territory, collect taxes, regulate behavior, or do many of the other things associated with traditional political order. In the days when most wealth was held in the form of land, states could exercise considerable leverage on wealthy elites; today, that wealth can easily flee to offshore bank accounts.38 It is therefore no longer possible to speak simply about “national development.” In political science, comparative politics and international relations have traditionally been regarded as distinct subfields, the one dealing with things that happen within states, the other with relationships among states.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

The oceanic datacenter symbolizes the infrastructural offshoring that is one productive accident of the Cloud layer: the delamination of the layers of territory, economy, and sovereignty, one from the other, potentially perforating the domain of the state with the economies of nonstate infrastructure beamed in from the middle of the open ocean. This may conjure images of other ad hoc circumventions of national geography, such as pirate radio, offshore banking, and unrecognized microstates. But unlike these, the Cloud layer is not a peculiar outlier from an otherwise stable system of territorial sovereignty; rather, it is the technical basis of an emergent global system, an exception that takes on the force and diction of a geopolitical norm. The Cloud layer hosts more than a few streams of pirate data; it can carry entire cultures, economies, societies, and religions.


pages: 233 words: 71,775

The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy

banking crisis, banks create money, carbon tax, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, full employment, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, green new deal, high net worth, Jeremy Corbyn, land value tax, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, offshore financial centre, price elasticity of demand, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, savings glut, seigniorage, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing

In my study of this data, which was published in July 2015,16 I showed that there was very clear suggestion of profit-shifting taking place, with billions of euros of profits appearing to be reallocated by just seventeen EU banks to places like Belgium, Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Jersey and the Isle of Man, all of which have reputations as tax havens, and away from countries like Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain. Unsurprisingly, the reaction from big business, and most especially that based in the USA, has been furious.17 Those who have gained enormously from using tax havens and from the secrecy that corporate accounting, combined with tax haven opacity, has been able to create do not want to give up the benefits without a fight, but the moves are all against them. It is widely thought that country-by-country reporting will be voluntarily disclosed by many companies within a few years, paving the way to mandatory publication by all multinational corporations.

This migration disciplines profligate governments and rewards nations that lower tax rates and engage in pro-growth tax reform.3 The emphasis is mine, and appropriate. Think tanks like those Mitchell works for go out of their way to defend tax havens.4 And what they are really saying is that tax havens should be able to use their laws to undermine the tax laws of other states by inducing the relocation of economic activity to low-tax jurisdictions. There can be no doubt that some low-tax states – like Ireland – have induced some real companies to relocate real economic activities through the offer of low taxes. But even places like Ireland are also part of the tax haven activity which induces no real change in economic activity at all, merely the relocation for tax purposes of where accountants record the profits of the companies for whom they work.

Others evade tax by not declaring investment income, rental income (especially common in the buy-to-let sector), capital gains tax that is due, or inheritance tax that they may owe.31 And some use tax havens and offshore arrangements to hide their crime of tax evasion. In 2014, at long last, the government recognized the inherent criminality of this offshore abuse.32 That, however, came too late to do anything about the considerable sums already stashed offshore by those who have been involved in this activity. In 2014 I estimated that offshore tax abuse cost the UK £4.8 billion a year. But, a word of caution is needed. Whilst it is commonplace to think that tax havens are the root of all evil when it comes to tax evasion this is not true.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Indeed, among the rich countries, the UK is by far the most tolerant of tax havens. Wealthy and influential members of Britain’s economic elite have a long history of exploiting tax havens to dodge British tax laws. The Prime Minister’s own fortune is in part attributable to tax havens. As the Guardian reported, ‘David Cameron’s father ran a network of offshore investment funds to help build the family fortune that paid ‌for the prime minister’s inheritance.’27 The UK’s top twenty companies have more than a thousand ‌subsidiaries in offshore tax havens.28 An investigation of the use of tax havens found that sixty-eight MPs and peers were either directors or had a controlling interest in businesses ‌with links to tax havens.29 These Parliamentarians have influence over tax and financial regulations in relation to tax havens.

Bogle, 21 September 2011. ‌24 A good deal has been written on tax havens in recent years. Two of the best descriptions and analyses are Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy & Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), and Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Vintage Books, 2012). ‌25 Tax Justice Network, 27 January 2011. ‌26 ‘Greece would have avoided a bailout if it were not for tax havens, says former PM’, The Telegraph, 30 August 2012. ‌27 Ed Howker & Shiv Malik, ‘Cameron family fortune made in tax havens’, The Guardian, 20 April 2012. ‌28 ‘Revealed: Tax havens of the top 20 UK companies’, This Is Money, 24 January 2011. ‌29 Fajeev Syal & Martin Williams, ‘Tory treasurer wants UK to become more like a tax haven’, The Guardian, 21 September 2012. ‌30 Ibid. ‌31 Tom Bergin, ‘Special Report: How Starbucks avoids UK taxes’, Reuters, 15 October 2012. ‌32 Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Vintage Books, 2011). ‌33 Before the imposition of the fixed charges, Richard Murphy estimated the annual revenue loss to be in excess of £4.3 billion.

Among the better known are the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Panama, and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, as well as Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Although many are small, exotic islands that conjure up sunny images of the good life, tax havens actually inflict ‌incalculable harm on the world.24 By depositing their assets in tax haven banks, the world’s wealthy are able to hide their assets from tax authorities in their own country. Tax havens thus facilitate a wide range of clearly objectionable outcomes – including drug and human trafficking and other forms of organized crime, embezzlement and bribery. In addition, tax havens help terrorists move untraceable funds around the world; they allow individuals to escape from professional, parental and other legal obligations; they distort world trade and investment flows; and they exacerbate financial crises by making much of the global financial system invisible.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

The connection between U.S. military intervention and the promotion of capitalist enterprise had always been especially crass in the Caribbean. As for Grenada, an article in the Wall Street Journal eight years after the military invasion (October 29, 1991) spoke of “an invasion of banks” and noted that St. George’s, the capital of Grenada, with 7500 people, had 118 offshore banks, one for every 64 residents. “St. George’s has become the Casablanca of the Caribbean, a fast-growing haven for money laundering, tax evasion and assorted financial fraud. . . .” After a study of various U.S. military interventions, political scientist Stephen Shalom (Imperial Alibis) concluded that people in the invaded countries died “not to save U.S. nationals, who would have been far safer without U.S. intervention, but so that Washington might make clear that it ruled the Caribbean and that it was prepared to engage in a paroxysm of violence to enforce its will.”


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Worryingly, Myners was more recently appointed as an independent director to reform the failing Cooperative Group. 77 Newman, M. (2012) ‘Conservative peer hired as tax haven lobbyist’, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 17 April, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/04/17/conservative-peer-hired-as-tax-haven-lobbyist/. 78 Sayal, R. and Williams, M. (2012) ‘Tory treasurer wants UK to become more like a tax haven’, Guardian, 21 September, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/20/tory-treasurer-make-uk-tax-haven. 79 Mason, R. (2012) ‘Britain could prevent the use of tax havens by ending “archaic” business rules’, Telegraph, 21 September, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/9557273/Britain-could-prevent-the-use-of-tax-havens-by-ending-archaic-business-rules.html. 80 Drucker, J. (2013) ‘Europe eases corporate tax dodge as worker burdens rise’, Bloomberg News, 13 May, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-13/europe-eases-corporate-tax-dodge-as-worker-burdens-rise.html. 81 Murphy, R. (2013) ‘For a man who says he thinks tax evasion is repugnant George Osborne is doing his utmost to promote it’, Tax Research UK, 23 March, http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2012/03/23/for-a-man-who-says-he-thinks-tax-evasion-is-repugnant-george-osborne-is-doing-his-utmost-to-promote-and-assist-it/. 82 Palan et al (2010), p 7. 83 Centre for Economics and Business Research (2011) ‘The 50p tax – good intentions, bad outcomes: the impact of high rate marginal tax on government revenues in a world with no borders’, http://conservativehome.blogs.com/files/cebr-report---final.pdf.

Thanks to John Christensen for this quote. 50 This section draws substantially from Nicholas Shaxson’s superb (2012) Treasure islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world, London: Vintage. See also Urry, J. (2014) Offshoring, Cambridge: Polity. 51 Research by Actionaid: ‘FTSE 100 tax haven tracker’, http://www.actionaid.org.uk/tax-justice/ftse-100-tax-haven-tracker. 52 Murphy, R. and Christensen, J. (2014) ‘Tax us if you can’, 2nd edn, London: Tax Justice Network, available at: http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcatart=134&lang=1. 53 Palan, R., Murphy R. and Chavagneux, C. (2010) Tax havens: How globalization really works, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp 5–6. 54 Channel 4 News, 14 June 2013. 55 See Palan et al (2010), pp 38–40. 56 Said, S. (2011) ‘The 10 biggest tax havens in the world’, The Richest, 15 September, http://www.therichest.com/expensive-lifestyle/location/the-10-biggest-tax-havens-in-the-world/. 57 http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/index.html. 58 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2012) ‘City of London Corporation reveals its secret £1.3bn bank account’, 20 December, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/12/20/city-of-london-corporation-reveals-its-secret-1-3bn-bank-account/. 59 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2012) ‘Streets paved with gold’, 9 July, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/07/09/streets-paved-with-gold-the-local-authority-that-works-for-the-banks/. 60 Shaxson (2012), p 265; Nelson, F. (1996) ‘Labour rift over city overhaul’, Independent, 7 April, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/labour-rift-over-city-overhaul-1303565.html.

See also http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130628/believe-it-or-not13-mind-blowing-facts-about-tax-evading-corporations. 74 Howker, E. and Malik, S. (2012) ‘Cameron family fortune made in tax havens’, Guardian, 20 April, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/apr/20/cameron-family-tax-havens. 75 http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/09/10/david-cameron-takes-leave-of-his-senses-as-he-declares-the-uk-has-no-tax-havens-left/#sthash.PMFksAlX.dpuf. 76 Watts, R. and Ungoed-Thomas, J. (2009) ‘Minister in charge of offshore clampdown ran tax haven firm’, Sunday Times, 22 March, http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/article157241.ece. Myners was already in trouble for approving a £703,000-per-year pension for Fred Goodwin, head of the failed bank RBS.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

To stem profit shifting to tax havens, we should stop the tax system’s favoring of foreign income. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), we allowed the deferral of US taxation on foreign income until it was repatriated to the United States. Post TCJA, we tax haven income at half the US rate, and completely exempt from tax the first ten percent of the return on assets. Rather than either of these approaches, we should tax foreign income as it is earned at the normal rate (allowing a tax credit for foreign tax). Doing so would remove the tax incentive to shift profits to tax havens as well as the tax disincentive to repatriate income.41 An alternative, more incremental, step would be to institute a per-country minimum tax that would tax foreign income as it was earned, not allowing deferral of US tax on income earned in the lowest-tax countries.

Just How Special Are Tax Havens? By almost any plausible metric, the affiliates of multinational firms book too much income in tax havens, relative to the true economic activity that occurs there. In 2010, affiliates of US multinational firms reported profits in Bermuda that were sixteen times the size of the entire Bermuda economy, and reported profits in the Cayman Islands that were twenty times the size of that economy.1 US multinational firms have accumulated over $2.6 trillion in permanently reinvested earnings in low-tax locations, over $1 trillion of which is held in cash. Seven tax havens are responsible for over half the foreign profits of US multinational firms, and these seven havens have a combined population that is less than that of California.

Clausing, “In Search of Corporate Tax Incidence,” Tax Law Review 65:3 (2012), 433–472. 41. Double taxation is avoided by providing foreign tax credits for taxes paid to foreign governments. Still, foreign tax credits will be very small for income earned in tax havens since so little foreign tax is paid. 42. A per-country minimum tax especially reduces the incentive to earn income in tax havens. A global minimum tax may perversely encourage foreign income in both high- and low- tax (haven) foreign countries relative to income earned in the United States, since high-tax foreign income can offset minimum tax due on haven income. 43. An astounding 82 percent of profit shifting occurs with respect to seven havens with effective tax rates lower than 5 percent.


pages: 177 words: 38,221

Financing Basic Income: Addressing the Cost Objection by Richard Pereira

banks create money, basic income, behavioural economics, carbon credits, carbon tax, income inequality, job automation, Lyft, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, quantitative easing, sovereign wealth fund, Tobin tax, transfer pricing, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Wall-E

How many Canadian tax dollars are we losing to tax havens? . . . There are three independent estimates that put the figure as high as $80 billion a year that federal and provincial governments are losing to various forms of tax evasion. A recent Statistics Canada report showed that a quarter of all Canadian direct investment abroad was going to countries that have been identified as tax havens. Barbados was the destination for $53 billion in 2011. (CPJ – Citizens for Public Justice 2012; Canadians for Tax Fairness n.d.) As concerns developing countries, tax havens facilitate transfer pricing, capital flight and corruption worth 10 times the value of aid received by these countries (CPJ 2012).

Transfer pricing allows such corporations to use offshore tax havens and other mechanisms to misprice transactions between companies in a group (Clinch 2012). The issue affects all countries and their ability to provide public goods, including UBI. If we take the $342 billion in total savings available from UBI implementation identified thus far ($132 billion in savings from Young and Mulvale’s net costing plus additional savings of $210 billion detailed in Subsection “First Response: Savings from Replacement of Existing Income Security Programmes”) and add the $80 billion in tax leakage from Canada to offshore tax havens each year, a large surplus is further built up by implementing the NIT version of UBI, as well as surpluses achieved by implementing the demogrant version of UBI as costed by multiple proposals in the cost objection.

.), Financing Basic Income, Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54268-3 113 114 INDEX F Fee and dividend, 4, 34, 104 Food banks, 28 Forget, Evelyn, 103 France, 50–52 Free-riding, 10, 15, 31–34, 35 G GDP, 12, 20, 21, 51, 52, 68, 91, 93 Germany, 50, 51, 52, 59, 60 GFC (Global Financial Crisis), 72, 78 H Healthcare, 2, 19, 23, 24, 41n25, 51, 57, 102, 103 Land rent, 79, 82, 84–85, 94 Liberal theory of rent, economic rent, 79, 82, 93 LICO (Low income cut-off), 12, 13, 38n6 Liquidity rent, 87 Locke, John, 79 M Maternity, paternity leave, benefits, 20, 21 Mill, John Stuart, 78 Mincome, 103 Monopoly (rent), 89 Multiple jobholding, multiple job workers, 21 Murray, Charles, 2, 5n1, 81 I Individual Savings Account program (UK), 19 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 111n8 International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 92, 93 N Negative Income Tax (NIT), 3, 5, 20, 24–28, 31, 34, 35, 41n23, 41n28, 67, 102–104, 106 Norway, 5, 83, 85, 104, 105n4 J Japan, 78, 94 O Oil fund, 83 K Keynes, Maynard John, 78 P Paine, Thomas, 79 Pension(s) AHV – Switzerland, 53, 55, 58, 67, 71 Canada Pension Plan (CPP)/ Quebec Pension Plan (QPP), 16, 36 Old Age Security (OAS) – Canada, 54–55, 73n11 Philanthropy, 83 L Labour (forms of free labour being extracted), 32 Labour income, 10, 25, 32 Labour-market, 2, 13, 20, 31, 33, 34, 65, 67, 71 Labour standards, 40 INDEX Precarious jobs, employment, precarity, 17, 22, 32, 102 Pregnancy, pregnant women and job dismissals, 21 Public trust resource, 88 R Registered Retirement Savings Plan, 16 See also Tax shelters Regressive taxation, 38–39n7 See also Taxes Royalties, 78, 82, 104 S Scarcity (rent), 89, 93 Social housing, 4, 20, 22, 23, 28, 40n21 Sovereign Wealth Funds, see Norway; Alaska; Oil fund Speculation, 15, 32, 33, 60, 82 speculative activity, 64 T Taxes carbon tax, 4, 95; carbon fee, 4; carbon levy, 4; fee and dividend, 4 corporate taxes, 4, 85; cuts, 4; multinational companies, 27, 105; reductions, 4 evasion, 4, 25, 26, 27 personal income tax, 4–5, 10, 14, 15, 25–28, 32, 34, 102, 105n1 regressive, 17, 38n7, 60, 104 tax cuts, 4, 34, 35, 105; to corporate rates, 4; by implementing basic income, 4; neo-liberalism, 27, 52, 78 115 tobin tax, 33(speculation tax[es]) unearned vs. earned income, 17, 39n10, 82, 103, 104 VAT, sales taxes, 38n4 Tax exemptions, 4, 60–61, 103 Tax-Free Savings Accounts (TFSA), 17, 19 See also Tax shelters Tax havens, offshore tax havens, 26, 27, 103 Tax shelters, 4, 17, 39n12, 102, 104, 105n2 Transfer pricing, 26, 27 U Underemployment, 17 Underground economy, 37n2 Unearned income (vs. earned income), 17, 18, 31, 39n10, 78, 82, 83, 103, 104 Unemployment, 53, 67, 81 United Kingdom (UK), 19, 27, 50, 88 United States (US), 4, 5n1, 22, 24, 34, 41n25, 78, 81, 87, 88, 93, 94, 95 Universal Basic Income (UBI), 3, 4, 9–28, 30–34, 38n4, 38n6, 39n10, 39n11, 40n19 See also Basic Income Universal dividend, 3, 5, 101, 103, 104, 105n4 Universal public health care (or universal health care), 2, 23 Unjust dismissal, dismissal (pregnant women and employers), 21 Unpaid internships, 32 Unpaid overtime, 21, 32 Unpaid work, unpaid labour, 21, 32, 38n4 116 INDEX V Van Parijs, Philippe, 11, 12, 25, 67, 82 Vermont (and public trust resources), 83, 88, 90, 95 W Whistleblower protection, 106n1 White, Stuart, 11, 25 Windfall profits, 103, 104, 105n4 See also Economic rent WITB (Working Income Tax Benefit) See also EITC [US] Workplace culture(s), 21 Workplace disability (and costs), 33 Workplace mental health, 33 Workplace standards violations, 40n17 See also Labour standards


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

The production of each iPhone should therefore generate exports for the countries that make the components (mainly Korea, Japan, and Taiwan), imports of those components for the country where it is assembled (China), exports of finished devices from the country where it is assembled (China again), and exports for the country that produced the operating system and other bundled software (the United States). This is not what happens. Instead, much of the value generated by Apple’s American operation is counted as an export from a corporate tax haven. While most of the value generated by Apple comes from its workers in the United States, much of the income Apple generates when it sells its wares abroad is officially paid to Apple’s tax haven subsidiaries. The exact mechanics are complicated and have likely evolved over time, but the simplified version goes something like this. First, Apple’s Irish subsidiary pays a fee to the parent in Cupertino, California, to cover the cost of research and development.

The seven corporate tax havens together were responsible for more than $324 billion in U.S. direct investment income in 2018. Subpart F may have been rendered mostly useless by the Treasury’s mistake in 1996, but until the 2017 tax law changed things, the Revenue Act of 1962 still meant that American corporations could avoid paying U.S. taxes on those foreign profits only if they were reinvested abroad. Dividends and stock buybacks were not allowed. Almost anything else, however, was acceptable. The result was that subsidiaries of American multinationals located in corporate tax havens accumulated trillions of dollars of financial assets in the past two decades.

The passage of the 2017 U.S. corporate income tax changes meant that American companies could return as much of these offshore savings to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks as they wished. So far, the impact has been relatively modest: American companies withdrew just $250 billion from their foreign subsidiaries in 2018. But the impact has been much larger in the corporate tax havens. There, withdrawals were worth $319 billion in 2018. The corollary was a $256 billion decline in the value of U.S. bonds held by residents of the major corporate tax havens between November 2017 and June 2018.40 Standard trade data are filled with misinformation for the untrained analyst. The importance of international tax avoidance means that standard bilateral figures are deeply misleading.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

THE ESTABLISHMENT: CROWN AND CHURCH Queen Victoria bought Helen Walch, Sandringham: A Royal Estate for 150 Years (The Sandringham Estate, 2012). Sandringham has grown Ibid., map on pp. 118–19. tax haven of Jersey Land Registry land titles show that Houghton Hall and its surrounding estate is registered in the name of Jersey-based company Mainland Nominees Ltd. See also the entry for Mainland Nominees Ltd on Companies House, which states it to be registered in Jersey. On Jersey’s status as a tax haven, see John Christensen, ‘Portrait of a tax haven: Jersey’, 5 November 2017, https://www.taxjustice­.net/2017/11­/05­/portrait­-tax­-haven-jersey/ Balmoral in Scotland In fact, the situation with Balmoral is even more complicated: it’s owned by a trust, of which the Queen is the principal beneficiary.

But who owns Albanwise? Thanks to Companies House publishing Persons of Significant Control, we now know: a mysterious Italian billionaire called Count Padulli, who also owns a 4,500-acre estate in Norfolk. His country of residence, however, is stated to be the tax haven of Guernsey. The increasing trend in recent decades to base companies overseas, and often in offshore tax havens, has presented a fresh challenge to obtaining information on who owns England. Offshore jurisdictions like Guernsey, the British Virgin Islands and Panama aren’t just attractive to companies for reasons of ‘tax efficiency’: they also provide a cloak of secrecy, with less transparent company registries than the UK.

Increasingly, some large landholdings were now being made over by deed entirely to professional wealth managers, like Rathbones Trust Company Ltd, who today are the registered owners of the Marquess of Northampton’s Compton Wynyates estate, among others. What was new at the time was the increasing registration of landed estates in offshore tax havens. Britain was integral to the development of the modern system of tax havens during the 1960s and 70s. As Nicholas Shaxson has charted, former colonies like the Cayman Islands joined Guernsey, Jersey and the City of London to create a web that would ‘catch financial business from nearby jurisdictions by offering lightly taxed, lightly regulated and secretive boltholes for money’.


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What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

American business contributes less than one-third the share of taxes by Australian firms, for example.30 Piratical Tax Havens: Stealing Tax Revenue from Neighbors There are plenty of American firms with tax rates approaching the nominal rate of 35 percent, but the average effective rate is 21 percent because thousands of others pay far less. And most are multinationals exploiting tax havens abroad, small rogue nations, such as Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, which parasitically pirate their neighbors’ taxes. Tax havens are state-sponsored thieves that have created an enormous industry serving drug and arms dealers, despots, American multinationals, blood diamond warlords, and African elephant killers (tusk smugglers)—along with your ordinary wealthy tax dodger.

Shell and BP have created nearly 1,000 paper entities in tax parasites to filter profits, including more than 100 in the Caribbean.44 Nearly 19,000 US firms, including hedge funds and large banks such as JP Morgan Chase, maintain tax addresses at a single Cayman Island law firm, Maples and Calder.45 In 2009, Congressional GAO investigators determined that 83 of the largest 100 American firms exploit tax havens.46 Such behavior isn’t punished; in fact, 63 of those firms including Boeing, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, and Merck receive large federal contracts. Tax-haven habitués also include 14 banks that were saved from bankruptcy by the 2008 taxpayer bailout. The family capitalism countries confront the same problem, although two of their number (Belgium and Netherlands) are also significant tax havens. For example, McDonald’s and Starbucks count Europe as important markets, but pay virtually no tax on sales there.

He concluded: “Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in top tax rates have had little association with savings, investment, or productivity growth.”55 Other factors influence these macroeconomic variables, but tax rates on capital do not. Equally important to the question of tax fairness is elimination of tax havens used by wealthy citizens and multinational enterprises to shift their taxes onto others. Tax havens launder money. They are pirates, surfing the global economy, indulged by politicians in Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo, and Washington. The OECD has identified forty-two tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, where hiding foreign money is an economic mainstay. Local economies there prosper from banking laws promising low taxes and secrecy to wealthy foreigners, drug dealers, smugglers, multinationals, arms merchants, and tyrants with bloody hands.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Across Britain, they have been used to fund schools, streetlights, prisons, police stations and care homes, burdening central and local government with huge debts to financial capital estimated at a whopping £310 billion, more than five times the value of the assets created.28 Much of the rental income from taxpayer-funded debt payments is going to investment funds based in tax havens. The biggest holders of PFI equity are Semperian, based in the tax haven of Jersey; Innisfree, the biggest investor in hospitals after the NHS, whose largest shareholder is Jersey-based Coutts & Co.; 3i Infrastructure, a Jersey-based subsidiary of 3i, a venture capital company; and Equitix, acquired in 2015 by Tetragon Financial Group, based in Guernsey, another tax haven.29 NHS privatisation has been accelerated by the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which basically abolished the government’s responsibility to provide a national health service.

Chapter 3 deals with one of the dirty secrets of the age: the stealthily built edifice of subsidies that in diverse ways flow to the plutocracy, the elite, their corporate equivalents and other rentiers. Those below them pay the price in higher taxes, lower benefits and worse public services. The rentiers have shunted much of their wealth into tax havens, as the Panama Papers leaked in spring 2016 so comprehensively revealed. No fewer than seventy-two former or current heads of state or government – princes, sheikhs, Presidents and Prime Ministers – were exposed, as well as a wide array of the world’s wealthiest. Those tax havens did not come about and persist for many years by accident; they were and remain a means of subsidising the rich, a hand-out they neither earn nor deserve. Chapter 4 reviews a contrasting side of the global economy, the spread of many forms of debt, which might once have been expected to fade as economies became richer and their residents wealthier.

Over ten years it paid $5 million to the founder’s family and $80 million to fundraisers, but gave just $890,000 to cancer patients. Other tax-dodging devices include setting up trusts and parking assets in offshore (and in some countries, onshore) tax havens, of which there are over fifty, serving as domicile for 2 million companies and thousands of banks, funds and insurers. While no one knows exactly how much is stashed away, some estimates put it at over $20 trillion. We are not talking just about Caribbean islands or Panama. In 2013, the US state of Delaware, a tax haven, was home to 945,000 mostly shell companies, more than its 917,100 population. Corporate tax avoidance skirts illegality. The European Commission is investigating a ‘sweetheart deal’ between Apple and the Irish authorities, which allegedly allowed it to shelter profits from tax in return for maintaining jobs in Ireland.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

See Eoin Burke-Kennedy, “Ireland Branded One of World’s Worst Tax Havens,” Irish Times, December 12, 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/ireland-branded-one-of-world-s-worst-tax-havens-1.2901822; and Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thrives-as-a-corporate-tax-haven.html. 33. For one way that this might work, see Zucman, The Missing Wealth of Nations. For an alternative solution to the same underlying problem, see Reuven Avi-Yonah, “The Shame of Tax Havens,” American Prospect, December 1, 2015, http://prospect.org/article/shame-tax-havens. 34.

Any American citizen or permanent resident must pay taxes in the United States.27 Other countries should follow America’s lead and end the preferential treatment of citizens who move to tax havens for part of the year to evade the obligation to pay their fair share.28 Even in the United States, the same principle could be enforced more vigorously and extended to factors beyond citizenship: for example, it might make sense to require anybody who owns residential real estate in a country to pay taxes there.29 While this rule would go a long way toward solving the noxious role that legal tax havens play, it would not do anything to solve the problem of illegal tax havens. But here, too, the nation state holds more trump cards than the fatalists tend to assume.

“Broken at the Top: How America’s Dysfunctional Tax System Costs Billions in Corporate Tax Dodging,” Oxfam America, April 14, 2016, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/Broken_at_the_Top_4.14.2016.pdf. See also Gabriel Zucman, The Missing Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Scott D. Dyreng and Bradley P. Lindsey, “Using Financial Accounting Data to Examine the Effect of Foreign Operations Located in Tax Havens and Other Countries on U.S. Multinational Firms’ Tax Rates,” Journal of Accounting Research 47 (2009): 1283–1316. 22. Michael S. Knoll, “The Taxation of Private Equity Carried Interests: Estimating the Revenue Effects of Taxing Profit Interests as Ordinary Income,” William and Mary Law Review 50, no. 1 (2008): 115–161.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

For more information, we may turn to recent estimates of the amount of funds held in tax havens. The use of these havens is not a neat indicator of corruption, but the two are related. Of course, money made through corruption need not be held in tax havens; it can be “converted” into legitimate activities or, for example, used to buy real estate in London or New York. Thus, assessing the size of tax havens alone could underestimate corruption. But it could also overestimate it, since money earned legally can also be placed in tax havens, simply for the purpose of avoiding taxation. In either case, however, most of the money held in tax havens is extra legal in that it is corrupt either in origin or in intention (to evade taxes).20 Using data on anomalies in assets positions across countries, Gabriel Zucman (2013, 1322) estimated that in 2008, about $5.9 trillion—8 percent of global household financial wealth, or 10 percent of global GDP—was held in tax havens (three-quarters of it unrecorded).

This is something that would have been as difficult to imagine in the India of the 1970s as in the Soviet Union of the same era, but that has become a somewhat banal technique in the age of globalization. Here one needs to consider more carefully the enabling role of the global financial centers and tax havens. The latter have been extensively discussed—especially those in Switzerland and Luxembourg—by Gabriel Zucman in The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015). The role of tax havens has also been starkly documented by the release of the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, and in Brooke Harrington’s book Capital without Borders (2016). But the role of large financial centers like London, New York, and Singapore has attracted less attention.

The second ground, the enabling of corruption, is linked with the openness of capital accounts and the battery of services, located either in rich countries or in tax havens, whose main objective is to attract thieves from poorer countries or tax evaders from rich countries by promising them, respectively, immunity from legal pursuit if they bring their money to the countries where the rule of law holds, or shelter from taxes. Here there are lots of things that can be done. Cracking down on tax havens would be relatively easy if important countries that themselves are big losers because their own citizens evade taxes decided to do so.


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Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

Or was it the many other reasons put forward so effectively by the Leavers: too few good employment opportunities, too many immigrants, loss of border controls, European courts very occasionally having the effrontery to suggest (usually correctly) that our courts were not being just? What about the retired in Spain, the borders with Gibraltar and Ireland, the Channel Islands and other tax havens – had Brexiteer leaders done any homework on those? How good is a tax haven when your country becomes poorer and an outcast from where the action is? Or were a few people, who had a lot of money to spend on securing the result they wanted, not thinking about that and just wanting to be in the limelight and have the opportunity to indulge in splendid jingoism?

Of the more than 100 former colonies, protectorates and dominions once ruled by Britain (depending on how you count them), fifty-two eventually transformed into the Commonwealth, while some remain as British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. Thirty of those are not very significant for trade, having populations of less than three million or so, but fifteen operate as tax havens. Hardly any of the other European overseas territories are tax havens (see Figure 2.3). The empire has largely gone. What remains today is chiefly significant because of its international tax avoidance/evasion industry. FIGURE 2.3: EU OVERSEAS TERRITORIES AND OUTERMOST REGIONS 2018 The British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies are labelled in bold.34 As we write in November 2018, in the very near future Britain will have three choices: it could return humiliated to the European Union by not actually leaving at the last minute; or it could only partly leave (soft Brexit and a long transition) and so lose power and influence while still having to abide by the rules; or it could bail out very fast (hard Brexit).

See: Donnelly, S. (2015) ‘Sidney Webb – the early years’, LSE History blog, 13 July, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2015/07/13/sidney-webb-the-early-years/ 4 Verkaik, R. (2018) Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Run Britain, London: Oneworld. 5 Maley, J. (2006) ‘£45,000 damages for teacher who accused Prince Harry of cheating’, The Guardian, 14 February, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/feb/14/schools. publicschools 6 Evans, A. (2017) ‘Eton deputy head quits amid cheating scandal’, Daily Mail, 25 August (updated online 29 August), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4824050/Eton-deputy-head-quits-amid-claims-helped-pupils-cheat.html 7 Stephens, P. (2017) ‘Brexit has broken British politics’, Financial Times, 9 November, https://www.ft.com/content/8e592d24-c482-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675 8 Maidment, J. (2017) ‘Almost two thirds of Conservative Party members want Theresa May to resign as Prime Minister’, Daily Telegraph, 10 June, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/10/almost-two-thirds-conservative-party-members-want-theresa-may/ 9 Osborne, S. (2016) ‘Stephen Crabb resigns as Work and Pensions Secretary citing family concerns’, The Independent, 14 July, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/stephen-crabb-resigns-theresa-may-cabinet-latest-appointments-sackings-work-and-pensions-secretary-a7136651.html 10 Doward, J. (2017) ‘Revealed: why Michael Fallon was forced to quit as defence secretary’, The Guardian, 4 November, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/04/michael-fallon-defence-secretary-sexual-harassment 11 Osborne, S. (2016) ‘Stephen Crabb resigns as Work and Pensions Secretary citing family concerns’, op. cit. 12 Ryan, F. (2018) ‘The new work and pensions secretary is an insult to disabled people, The Guardian, 16 January, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/16/esther-mcvey-work-pensions-secretary-insult-disabled-people 13 Anonymous (2017) ‘Capital Flight’, Private Eye, No. 1457, 30 November, p. 7. 14 Elgot, J. (2017) ‘Paradise Papers: Theresa May refuses to promise register of offshore trusts,’ The Guardian, 6 November, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/06/paradise-papers-theresa-may-refuses-to-promise-register-of-offshore-trusts 15 Weaver, M. (2017) ‘Damian Green denies making sexual advances towards young Tory activist’, The Guardian, 1 November, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/01/damian-green-denies-making-sexual-advances-towards-kate-maltby-tory-activist; and Walker, P. (2017) ‘Damian Green urged to step down during pornography inquiry’, The Guardian, 5 November, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/04/damian-green-denies-pornography-was-found-on-his-commons-computer 16 Sparrow, A. (2018) ‘May says she wants investigation into release of Damian Green information – as it happened’, 14 February, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2017/dec/21/damian-green-sacking-theresa-may-politics-live 17 http://mashable.com/2017/07/31/theresa-may-cabinet-the-scream-munch/#io9ddnqBKsqb 18 Salmon, J., Sinmaz, E. and Steiner, R. (2016) ‘Home Secretary Amber Rudd told to come clean over her embarrassing links to two firms set up in tax havens’, Daily Mail, 22 September, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3803116/Home-Secretary-Amber-Rudd-told-come-clean-embarrassing-links-two-firms-set-tax-havens.html. See also: Hughes, L. and Rayner, G. (2017) ‘Revealed: Nine Tory MPs on the so called “sex dossier” – with some included for already known relationships’, Daily Telegraph, 31 October, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/31/tory-minister-mp-accused-paying-women-keep-quiet/ 19 Sommerlad, N. (2014) ‘Millionaire Tory Philip Hammond’s £200 a month “tax dodge” – See video as our man confronts him’, Daily Mirror, 11 March, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/millionaire-tory-philip-hammonds-200-3231876 20 Seamark, M. (2013) ‘Boris’s secret lovechild and a victory for the public’s right to know’, Daily Mail, 21 May, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2328067/Boris-Johnsons-secret-lovechild-daughter-Stephanie-victory-publics-right-know.html 21 Unite the Union (2014) ‘Government links to private healthcare’, 28 November, https://web.archive.org/web/20170415154126/http://www.unitetheunion.org/uploaded/documents/final%20mp%20dossier%2028%20nov%201411-20887.pdf.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

In their SEC filings tax avoidance is explicitly given as a reason for holding such high levels of offshore reserves. The use of corporate debt by these companies therefore needs to be set in the context of a tax avoidance strategy. This is also part of a broader trend towards the growing use of tax havens. In the wake of the crisis, offshore wealth grew by 25 per cent between 2008 and 2014,31 which resulted in an estimated $7.6 trillion of household financial wealth being held in tax havens.32 The point of all this is twofold. At one end, tax evasion and cash hoarding have left US companies – particularly tech companies – with a vast amount of money to invest. This glut of corporate savings has – both directly and indirectly – combined with a loose monetary policy to strengthen the pursuit of riskier investments for the sake of a decent return.

While the evidence is still preliminary, it does seem that quantitative easing has had an effect in this way: corporate yields have declined and stock markets have surged upwards.26 It may have had an effect on the non-financial sectors of the economy as well, by making much of the economic recovery dependent on $4.7 trillion of new corporate debt since 2007.27 Most important for our purpose is the fact that the generalised low interest rate environment built by central banks has reduced the rate of return on a wide range of financial assets. The result is that investors seeking higher yields have had to turn to increasingly risky assets – by investing in unprofitable and unproven tech companies, for instance. In addition to a loose monetary policy, there has been a significant growth in corporate cash hoarding and tax havens in recent years. In the United States, as of January 2016, $1.9 trillion is being held by companies in cash and cashlike investments – that is, in low-interest, liquid securities.28 This is part of a long-term and global trend towards higher levels of corporate savings;29 but the rise in cash hoarding has accelerated with the surge in corporate profits after the crisis.

This glut of corporate savings has – both directly and indirectly – combined with a loose monetary policy to strengthen the pursuit of riskier investments for the sake of a decent return. At the other end, tax evasion is, by definition, a drain on government revenues and therefore has exacerbated austerity. The vast amount of tax money that goes missing in tax havens must be made up elsewhere. The result is further limitations on fiscal stimulus and a greater need for unorthodox monetary policies. Tax evasion, austerity, and extraordinary monetary policies are all mutually reinforcing. To define the present conjuncture, we must add one further element: the employment situation.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

JURISDICTIONAL INTERACTIONS 128Global tax avoidance: Alex Cobham and Petr Jansky (Mar 2017), “Global distribution of revenue loss from tax avoidance,” United Nations University WIDER Working Paper 2017/55, https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/wp2017-55.pdf. 128Total cost to global tax revenue: Ernesto Crivelli, Ruud A. de Mooij, and Michael Keen (29 May 2015), “Base erosion, profit shifting and developing countries,” International Monetary Fund Working Paper 2015118, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Base-Erosion-Profit-Shifting-and-Developing-Countries-42973. 128Combined Reporting Systems: Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (2019), “28 states plus D.C. require combined reporting for the state corporate income tax,” https://www.cbpp.org/27-states-plus-dc-require-combined-reporting-for-the-state-corporate-income-tax. 130the “Delaware Loophole”: The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Dec 2015), “Delaware: An onshore tax haven,” https://itep.org/delaware-an-onshore-tax-haven/. 130This allows companies to shift: Patricia Cohen (7 Apr 2016), “Need to hide some income? You don’t have to go to Panama,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/business/need-to-hide-some-income-you-dont-have-to-go-to-panama.html. 130the other forty-nine states: Leslie Wayne (30 Jun 2012), “How Delaware thrives as a corporate tax haven,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thrives-as-a-corporate-tax-haven.html. 32. ADMINISTRATIVE BURDENS 132named this phenomenon: Pamela Herd and Donald P.

Then, using a loophole in Irish tax law, the company can shift the profits to entities in tax havens like Bermuda, Belize, Mauritius, or the Cayman Islands—to ensure that these profits remain untaxed. Next, add a second Irish company, this time for sales to European customers, also taxed at a low rate. Finally, use another vulnerability, this one involving a Dutch intermediary company, to transfer the profits back to the first Irish company and on to the offshore tax haven. Tech companies are particularly well-suited to exploit this vulnerability; they can assign intellectual property rights to subsidiary companies abroad, who then transfer cash assets to tax havens. That’s how companies like Google and Apple have avoided paying their fair share of US taxes despite being US companies.

By making clever use of foreign subsidiary companies and transferring both rights and incomes between them, large US corporations are able to avoid paying taxes on much of their global income. (Note that individual US citizens are taxed on their entire income, regardless of the country in which it was earned, so this trick only works for corporations.) This is just one of many hacks involving tax havens around the world. Global tax avoidance costs the US just under $200 billion a year, 1.1% of GDP. Total cost to global tax revenue is between $500 and $600 billion, depending on the estimate. What’s interesting about these hacks is that they leverage the interactions amongst a series of vulnerabilities in the laws of multiple countries.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The corporate class games the system—making sure its license to break the rules is built into the rules themselves. One of the most glaring examples of this continues to be the ability of corporations to cheat the public out of tens of billions of dollars a year by using offshore tax havens.35 Indeed, it’s estimated that companies and wealthy individuals funneling money through offshore tax havens are evading around $100 billion a year in taxes—leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab. And with cash-strapped states all across the country cutting vital services to the bone, it’s not like we don’t need the money. Here is Exhibit A of two sets of rules: According to the White House, in 2004, the last year data on this was compiled, U.S. multinational corporations paid roughly $16 billion in taxes on $700 billion in foreign active earnings—putting their tax rate at around 2.3 percent.36 Know many middle-class Americans getting off that easy at tax time?

In December 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded companies in the country—including AT&T, Chevron, IBM, American Express, GE, Boeing, Dow, and AIG—had subsidiaries in tax havens, or, as the corporate class comically calls them, “financial privacy jurisdictions.”37 Even more egregiously, of those 83 companies, 74 received government contracts in 2007.38 GM, for instance, got more than $517 million from the government—i.e. the taxpayers—that year, while shielding profits in tax-friendly places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. And Boeing, which received over $23 billion in federal contracts that year, had 38 subsidiaries in tax havens, including six in Bermuda. It’s as easy as opening up an island P.O. box, which is why another GAO study found that more than 18,000 companies are registered at a single address in the Cayman Islands, a country with no corporate or capital gains taxes.39 America’s big banks—including those that pocketed billions from the taxpayers in bailout dollars—seem particularly fond of the Cayman Islands.

Senate, 25 Jan. 2007, www.banking.senate.gov. 30 Over the same period, the top 1 percent: Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Update with 2007 Estimates),” Pathways Magazine, Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, Winter 2008, 6–7. 31 And according to a report released in May 2010: “The State of Metropolitan America,” 9 May 2010, www.brookings.edu. 32 Indeed, in a 2008 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, “Inside the Middle Class: Bad Times Hit the Good Life,” 9 Apr. 2008, www.pewsocialtrends.org. 33 It was, according to Pew: Ibid. 34 In a revised take on the original Misery Index: Marcus Baram, “The Real Misery Index April 2010: Underemployment Woes Lead to Two-Tier Economy,” 12 May 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 35 One of the most glaring examples: Gretchen Morgenson, “Death of a Loophole, and Swiss Banks Will Mourn,” 26 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com. 36 According to the White House: Office of the Press Secretary, “Leveling the Playing Field: Curbing Tax Havens and Removing Tax Incentives for Shifting Jobs Overseas,” 4 May 2009, www.whitehouse.gov. 37 In December 2008, the Government Accountability Office: United States Government Accountability Office, “International Taxation: Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with Subsidiaries in Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens or Financial Privacy Jurisdictions,” Dec. 2008, www.gao.gov. 38 Even more egregiously: Ibid. 39 It’s as easy as opening up: Michael Brostek, “Cayman Islands: Business Advantages and Tax Minimization Attract U.S.


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

By the end of 2000 there were six tribunals: the Moriarty Tribunal investigating payments to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry, a former Fine Gael minister; the Flood Tribunal on allegations of planning corruption; the Laffoy Commission in the abuse of children in institutions; the Lindsay Tribunal on the infection of haemophiliacs by contaminated blood products; the Barron inquiry on the Dublin, Monagahan and Dundalk bombings of 1974; and a non-statutory Dunne inquiry into organ retention by hospitals. The fees paid to lawyers were astronomical, and the work of the tribunals grindingly slow, not helped by the stalling mechanisms and legal challenges of various parties, some of whom had used offshore bank accounts to avoid the paying of tax. The early 1990s had also witnessed an investigation into the collusion of government and business in the beef trade. ‘I’ve taken this shit long enough. I’m not taking another minute of it’ The details of the tribunals were often complicated, made barristers into millionaires, and rarely looked like they would end in prosecutions for the wrongdoers, who could take some comfort in the fact that the tribunals were not courts of law.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

UK’s Conservative government: become a tax haven for all of Europe Adam Bienkov, “Theresa May ‘Stands Ready’ to Turn Britain into a Tax Haven after Brexit,” Business Insider, January 16, 2017, http://uk.businessinsider.com/​theresa-may-stands-ready-to-turn-britain-into-a-tax-haven-after-brexit-2017-1. “Von Olaf Gersemann and Ileana Grabitz. FULL INTERVIEW: Philip Hammond Suggests Britain Could Become a ‘Tax Haven’ after Brexit,” Welt via Business Insider, January 16, 2017, http://uk.businessinsider.com/​philip-hammond-suggests-britain-could-become-a-tax-haven-after-brexit-2017-1. “Brexit: George Osborne Says Tax Rises and Spending Cuts Needed,” BBC.com, June 23, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/​news/​uk-politics-eu-referendum-36647006.

Dubai: Reuters, “Trump Sons Open Dubai Golf Course, Praise U.S. Ally,” Reuters.com, February 18, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/​article/​us-usa-trump-dubai-golf-idUSKBN15X0OU. James S. Henry: private financial wealth of individuals in tax havens: $24–36 trillion James S. Henry, “Taxing Tax Havens,” Foreign Affairs, April 12, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/​articles/​panama/​2016-04-12/​taxing-tax-havens. You Are All fired! Trump and outsourcing to overseas factories Spencer Woodman, “Trump, China, and the Ties That Bind,” Racked, October 5, 2016, http://www.racked.com/​2016/​10/​5/​13165868/​donald-trump-china-factories-neckties.

In Britain, after the shock of the Brexit vote, many said they felt as though they’d woken up in a new, unrecognizable country. It was in that context that the UK’s Conservative government began floating a range of regressive reforms, including the idea that the only way for Britain to regain its competitiveness is by slashing regulations and taxes on the wealthy so much that it would effectively become a tax haven for all of Europe. It was also in this context that Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election against her low-polling rival, clearly in the hope of securing another term in office before the public has a chance to rebel against new austerity measures that are the antithesis of how Brexit was originally sold to voters


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

Global corporations hold more than $7 trillion of cash, much of it stashed in tax havens, the result of sophisticated tax avoidance. This cash is too tempting a target for government elites to pass up even if their corporate cronies are beneficiaries. A simple 25 percent toll charge on this $7 trillion yields $1.75 trillion in new G7 revenue. The money then goes toward mitigating sovereign debt burdens. Auditing corporations one at a time, one year at a time, is a fruitless task. Auditors cannot possibly penetrate more than a few avoidance techniques used by corporations. Putting pressure on individual tax havens is a game of whack-a-mole. The list of tax haven jurisdictions is so long—Cayman Islands, Malta, Cyprus, Macao, Isle of Man, British Virgin Islands, and so on and on—that if pressure is applied to one, companies seamlessly move profits to another with a few documents and keystrokes.

The list of tax haven jurisdictions is so long—Cayman Islands, Malta, Cyprus, Macao, Isle of Man, British Virgin Islands, and so on and on—that if pressure is applied to one, companies seamlessly move profits to another with a few documents and keystrokes. Tax havens will still resist changes to their internal laws. Recently, tax havens have cooperated with anti–money laundering programs because the cost of turning their backs on dirty business is small in relation to the benefits of keeping clean businesses such as Apple and Amazon. Once clean business is besieged for using the zero tax rates legally available, tax havens may push back and side with corporate clients. The solution in the works for G7 nations is world taxation. This starts with a centralized tax information database shared by developed nations.

Sovereign power always wins in the end because countries have decisive tools, including violence. Still, corporate capacity to corrupt a country through lobbying is sufficient in the short run to fend off state power. In a decentralized system of high-tax developed countries and low-tax haven countries, global corporations easily find ways to avoid taxation. Standard techniques include the transfer of intellectual property like patents and software to tax havens. Once there, intellectual property earns royalties without paying tax to the new host nation. Another technique is transfer pricing. Corporations in high-tax nations pay inflated costs to their affiliates in low-tax nations.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Yet countries like Ireland, the Netherlands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and numerous others participate in the world’s greatest race-to-the-bottom competition with extremely low or nonexistent corporate taxation to attract corporate profits. These tax havens effectively put intense pressure on every other nation to cycle down their corporate tax rates or risk firms artificially shifting their profits to avoid paying taxes by using convoluted techniques with names like the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich.” In 2015, 45 percent of the profits of multinational corporations based in the United States and other advanced economies were put on the books in tax havens. To be clear, the underlying economic activity generating those profits did not take place in the tax havens—it took place in the United States and other countries, using those countries’ advanced infrastructure, educated workforces, and legal systems that were paid for by those domestic taxpayers.

Much of it is high-value intellectual property, like patents, that was developed in the United States but “located” overseas for tax purposes. This shifts the profits out of the country to tax havens to avoid contributing taxes that could be reinvested in future public investment. The United States loses tens of billions of dollars annually in corporate revenue due to the artificial shifting of profits to tax havens.39 Global corporate taxation is a true prisoner’s dilemma. Every nation would be better off if no nation was able to compete principally by being a tax haven, but once some nations do, others are forced to race down. Their tax revenues shrink, either because of the reduced tax rates or their tax base leaving the country.

Even if we cannot quickly gain global cooperation on a minimum tax as Saez and Zucman propose, the United States could attack this issue by applying a minimum tax to U.S. multinational firms’ profits in each country, which would effectively create a tax “floor” and limit corporate incentives to shift profits to tax havens. President Obama proposed such a per-country minimum tax on the foreign profits of all U.S. multinational companies.40 Because an American company was going to pay that minimum each year—even if a tax haven promised an extremely low rate—there would be less incentive for other nations, including tax havens, to race faster to the bottom. That might also make it easier for other major industrial powers to impose their own minimum tax, which could at least slow down the race to the bottom.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

According to Wright and Zucman, “[US multinational] profits booked in tax havens have surged, from 20% of all foreign profits in the first half of the 1990s to 50% in recent years.”14 US businesses are particularly egregious, but such “profit shifting” is a global phenomenon. In another study, Zucman and colleagues estimated that 40 per cent of the global profits of the world’s multinationals is shifted into tax havens every year.15 The biggest beneficiaries are US companies; the biggest losers are those European Union countries that are not themselves tax havens. When the Green Party group in the European Parliament wanted to look into how Europe taxes multinationals, they found a huge mismatch between nominal tax rates and the taxes companies actually paid.

On average across the European Union, multinationals paid about 15 per cent of their profits in tax, as against the 23 per cent they would have paid according to nominal rates.16 These problems are not necessarily due to illegal tax evasion. In fact, much of it is perfectly legal tax avoidance, and even intentional on the part of policy makers—both from tax havens that use low tax rates to induce companies to “book” their profits there, and from big economies that allow their corporations to do so. For example, Wright and Zucman as well as other scholars attribute the move of US multinationals’ accounting profits to tax havens to the so-called check-the-box regulation by which some foreign subsidiaries of US companies can escape America’s corporate tax net by using legal entities that exploit inconsistencies between different jurisdictions.17 As another example, Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law rewarded past multinational profit shifting by hundreds of billions of dollars.18 Because of such policies, more than one-third of the world’s cross-border investment probably consists of “phantom investment,” capital moved solely to make use of accounting rules that reduce tax.19 These examples show that capital’s ability to avoid taxation reflects choices made by national governments.

The company used to reduce taxable profit in the United Kingdom to almost nothing, despite billions in coffee sales, by having the UK operation pay royalties for the Starbucks brand to a Dutch subsidiary.20 So by asserting that the profit relates to a brand or intellectual property, and moving the “address” of such intangible values to tax havens, multinationals are allowed to avoid corporate taxes even on products that decidedly predate the internet era. The digital giants, in their turn, deal in many physical activities: the Amazon and Uber examples should remind us that retail deliveries and taxi rides are as locally physical as they always were.


pages: 935 words: 267,358

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial intermediation, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index card, inflation targeting, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, meritocracy, Money creation, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, power law, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, twin studies, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

Banking data are already automatically shared with the tax authorities in a country with 300 million people like the United States, as well as in countries like France and Germany with populations of 60 and 80 million, respectively, so there is obviously no reason why including the banks in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland would radically increase the volume of data to be processed. Of course the tax havens regularly invoke other excuses for maintaining bank secrecy. One of these is the alleged worry that governments will misuse the information. This is not a very convincing argument: it is hard to see why it would not also apply to information about the bank accounts of those incautious enough to keep their money in the country where they pay taxes. The most plausible reason why tax havens defend bank secrecy is that it allows their clients to evade their fiscal obligations, thereby allowing the tax havens to share in the gains. Obviously this has nothing whatsoever to do with the principles of the market economy.

No real explanation of this phenomenon has been forthcoming. Note that these financial statistics and balance-of-payments data in theory cover the entire world. In particular, banks in the tax havens are theoretically required to report their accounts to international institutions. The “anomaly” can presumably be explained by various statistical biases and measurement errors. FIGURE 12.6. The net foreign asset position of rich countries Unregistered financial assets held in tax havens are higher than the official net foreign debt of rich countries. Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c. By comparing all the available sources and exploiting previously unused Swiss bank data, Gabriel Zucman was able to show that the most plausible reason for the discrepancy is that large amounts of unreported financial assets are held in tax havens.

In particular, it is more than twice as large as the official negative net position of the combined rich countries (see Figure 12.6).57 Now, all the evidence indicates that the vast majority (at least three-quarters) of the financial assets held in tax havens belongs to residents of the rich countries. The conclusion is obvious: the net asset position of the rich countries relative to the rest of the world is in fact positive (the rich countries own on average more than the poor countries and not vice versa, which ultimately is not very surprising), but this is masked by the fact that the wealthiest residents of the rich countries are hiding some of their assets in tax havens. In particular, this implies that the very sharp increase in private wealth (relative to national income) in the rich countries in recent decades is actually even larger than we estimated on the basis of official accounts.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

Tourist information The Welcome Centre in the Sea Terminal building at Douglas (Mon–Sat 8am–6pm, plus Sun 10am–2pm May–Sept only); 01624 686766, is the best place for island-wide information. Useful websites gov.im, visitisleofman.com and www.iomguide.com. Douglas Dubbed “the Naples of the North” by John Betjeman, DOUGLAS has developed since its 1950s heyday of seaside holiday-making into a major offshore financial centre. The seafront vista has changed little since Victorian times, and is still trodden by heavy-footed carthorses pulling trams (April–Sept, 9am–5.30pm; £3). On Harris Promenade the opulent Edwardian Gaiety Theatre sports a lush interior that can be seen on fascinating two-hour tours (Easter–Oct, Sat 10am; £8.50, call ahead; 01624 600555, www.villagaiety.com).


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

The biggest catch of all was the Swiss financial giant Credit Suisse, which pleaded guilty to criminal charges under FATCA in 2014 and paid a whopping $2.6 billion fine. Emboldened by the U.S. action, France, Germany, and other rich countries enacted their own versions of FATCA and went after banks in all the major tax havens. Under the auspices of the aforementioned JITSIC, countries beyond the United States and Europe joined the global war against tax havens; ninety-six nations signed on to an automated system of information sharing that would alert the tax authorities whenever their nationals deposited money in a bank overseas. Under intense pressure, some of the most recalcitrant champions of bank secrecy, including Cyprus, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands, weakened their financial secrecy laws.

If a big U.S. tractor company decides to move the headquarters of its spare-parts business to Switzerland, that should happen only if Switzerland is an important hub of the parts business, not because Switzerland has rock-bottom corporate tax rates. This is where low rates come in. If the rate is low, it’s less likely to influence personal and financial decisions; that is, the tax will be “neutral.” If the tax you owe is only 10% of your income, it’s probably not worth your while to pay a lawyer to design some complex tax haven scheme, or to move a whole branch of your company to a low-tax country. But if the tax man is going to take 17.9% or 35% or (in France) 75% of your income, then the lawyer’s complex scheme can save you serious money. The economist John Maynard Keynes was a famous advocate of progressive taxes, but he warned that higher rates run the risk of “making skillful evasions too much worthwhile.”2 High tax rates prompt people to spend money on the tax lawyers and finance wizards who design those skillful evasions.

In most nations, though, the property tax remains a fairly small share of overall government revenues—about 5% in the richest countries and even less in poorer nations where land has less value, according to the International Monetary Fund. Tax authorities like the property tax, because it is hard to evade. You can move your family and your bank accounts to some low-tax haven. But you can’t move your farm, or your beachfront hotel, or your twenty-eight-bedroom Palm Springs mansion across the border. Because a property tax imposes the heaviest burden on those with the biggest properties—that is, on the rich—it is also widely seen as a useful tool for fighting inequality.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

They want to wait for international coordination— a process that could take decades. Or they could simply move their trading overseas. If the proliferation of tax havens is any guide, there are plenty of places willing to bend (or end) rules to lure finance business.105 A small, hopeful step toward improving government understanding of financial flows happened when Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Thanks in part to a series of embarrassing investigations into tax havens by Senator Carl Levin, that law targets illicit income.106 But there is little reason in principle why its auditing requirements could not be expanded to encompass a larger view of financial flows.

Too many U.S. citizens were using offshore accounts to avoid paying U.S. taxes, reminiscent of the financial firms who locate dozens of shell companies in “secrecy jurisdictions” to deflect the attention of auditors or regulators.109 FATCA is shaping up to be a major advance in tracking global money flows.110 Tax havens may seem like an outlier in the global economy, a problem well outside the run of ordinary business. But tax havens 172 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY are among “the most powerful instruments of globalization,” critical to many business strategies.111 Shell company networks can be structurally similar to the webs of entities used by tax evaders. FATCA requires that FFIs report both on accounts held directly by individuals and on interests in accounts held by shell entities for the benefit of U.S. individuals.

Scott R. Peppet, “Unraveling Privacy: The Personal Prospectus and the Threat of a Full-Disclosure Future,” Northwestern Law Review 105 (2011): 1153–1204. 211. Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2012); Hedda Leikvang, “Piercing the Veil of Secrecy: Securing Effective Exchange of Information to Remedy the Harmful Effects of Tax Havens,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 45 (2012): 330; David Leigh, Harold Frayman, and James Ball, “Front Men Disguise the Offshore Game’s Real Players” (Nov. 2012). International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

To get a better sense of orders of magnitude, it is interesting to compare these overall tax evasion figures to estimates of tax evasion stemming from wealth hidden in tax havens like Luxembourg, the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Cypress, Panama, and, of course, Switzerland. In his 2015 book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, University of California professor Gabriel Zucman has estimated that total foreign financial wealth held in tax havens (including stocks, bonds, and bank accounts) amounts to about $7.6 trillion, or 8% of the world’s financial wealth of $95 trillion. Zucman estimates that the combined annual tax losses to the world’s governments due to tax havens are at least $200 billion per year, consisting of tax evasion on offshore income (dividends, interest payments, etc.) of about $125 billion, with the rest mainly being avoidance of wealth and inheritance taxes.

., 236n10 Stein, Jeremy, 177 Stockholms Banco, 25 subsidized debit cards, 48, 99–100, 204, 218 substituting interest-bearing debt for paper currency, cost of, 86–90 Suharto, 71 Summers, Lawrence, 122 Suzuki, Takashi, 235n6 Svennson, Lars, 231 Sweden: banknotes and coins in circulation, 108; cashless society, movement to, 107–9; currency/GDP ratio, 1995, 46–47; currency/GDP ratio, 2015, 36–37; decline in use of notes and coins, 84; declining total demand for large notes, 108; discount rate cuts in response to recent crises, 132; early private notes issued in, 25; financial stability concerns, negative interest rates and, 178; interest rates near the zero bound, 131; low-income individuals, accommodations for, 3; negative interest rates, payment on bonds and, 163; negative interest rates in, 5, 123; phaseout of large-denomination paper currency in, 95, 107, 109; revenue as a percentage of GDP, 2006–2015, 84 Swiss National Bank, 160–61, 246n23 Switzerland: borrowing capacity and debt-financed gold purchases, 246n23; currency/GDP ratio, 2015, 36; currency per capita, 37, 40; discount rate cuts in response to recent crises, 132; financial stability concerns, negative interest rates and, 178; foreign demand for paper currency of, 34; foreign holdings of currency, 41; interest rates near the zero bound, 131; large-denomination notes of, 31, 37; negative interest rates in, 5, 123; revenue as a percentage of GDP, 2006–2015, 83–84; as tax haven, 66; underground economy, estimated size of, 62–63 “taper tantrum” of May 2014, 126, 141 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, 233n6 tax evasion: in Canada, 65–66; consumer reward programs for verifying retail receipts, 65; in Europe, 61–65, 83; reducing, lost “profits” from printing currency covered by, 2; tax havens and, 66; in the United States, 60–61, 83; use of cash to facilitate, 59, 217 tax havens, 60, 66 Taxing Woman, A (Japanese film), 35 tax prepayment problem, 179–80 Taylor, John, 134, 188, 228, 231 Taylor rule, 193, 227–30, 244n5 Teles, Pedro, 243n10 terrorism, 76–77 Thatcher, Margaret (former prime minister, United Kingdom), 119 This Time Is Different data set, 252n2, 252n4 Trabandt, Mathias, 255n10 trade: misreporting of, 67 Tullock, Gordon, 174 Turkey, 191 Turner, Adair, 155 unbanked individuals.

Since nominal GDP has grown by roughly 30% since the last IRS benchmark year (2006), and assuming tax evasion has grown proportionately with GDP (which seems quite conservative, given that marginal tax rates have significantly increased and the size of the underground economy generally increases when growth tails off), this would translate to a 2015 net tax gap of $500 billion for federal taxes alone. True, some component of this gap is due to tax havens (e.g., in the Caribbean or Panama), perhaps 10–20%.6 But a large fraction of the remaining tax evasion derives from areas where there is no third-party information available,7 which of course rules out checks, credit card payments, and the like. That is, of the remaining tax gap, a large fraction (say, at least 50% and probably more) derives from cash-intensive areas.8 In the United States, state taxation is roughly 36% of the amount of federal taxation, and local taxation adds another 27% (so combined state and local tax collection is about two-thirds of federal tax revenue).9 Thus, accounting for evasion of state and local taxes would presumably raise total tax evasion estimates significantly, though not necessarily proportionately, because the tax mix is different.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Tax arbitrage is the practice by which firms take advantage of differences in tax rates and subsidies in different countries in order to similarly boost profits without boosting productivity. The former chief economist of McKinsey & Company, James S. Henry, has estimated that roughly one-fourth of all the world’s wealth is held in tax havens.6 According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2015 US-based multinationals recorded 43 percent of their foreign earnings as taking place in five tax havens—Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—which accounted for only 4 percent of their workforces.7 A single office building in Grand Cayman, named Ugland House, is the registered legal address of 18,557 companies.8 Even as they have exploited opportunities for international tax arbitrage, firms and lobbies in the post–Cold War era of globalization have also promoted regulatory arbitrage, the selective harmonization of laws and rules, when it has been in their interest to do so.

Laws and regulations that corporate lobbyists are unable to persuade national democratic legislatures to enact can be repackaged and hidden in harmonization agreements masked as lengthy trade treaties, which are then ratified by legislatures without adequate scrutiny. Whatever its minor benefits, legislation by treaty represents a massive transfer of power from democratic legislatures to corporate managers and bankers. Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of the tax haven Luxembourg who became the president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019, described how the European Council systematically expanded its authority by stealth: “We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens. If no clamor occurs . . . because most people do not grasp what had been decided, we continue—step by step, until the point of no return is reached.”9 * * * — BY FAR THE most important form of arbitrage strategy employed by Western-based corporations has been global labor arbitrage.

Exploiting the gap between the two nations’ tax laws, Apple Operations International has not filed an income tax return in either country, or any other country, for the past five years. From 2009 to 2012, it reported income totaling $30 billion.21 When Ireland changed its tax laws in 2015, Apple responded by secretly shifting some of its subsidiaries to another international tax haven, the Isle of Jersey.22 Adam Smith would not have been surprised. In The Wealth of Nations he wrote: “The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. He would be apt to abandon the country in which he was exposed to a vexatious inquisition, in order to be assessed to a burdensome tax, and would remove his stock to some other country where he could carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease.”23 Nor would Smith have been surprised by the centrality of labor arbitrage in the modern global economy: Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

, bbc.com, 1 July 2019, at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48759591 35 Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018, Figure E6. 36 C. Roberts and M. Lawrence, Wealth in the Twenty-First Century, London: IPPR, 2017. 37 G. Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Zucman estimated that hidden wealth has passed the $6 trillion mark. 38 A. Alstadsaeter, N. Johannesen and G. Zucman, ‘Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens? Macro Evidence and Implications for Global Inequality’, Journal of Public Economics 162, 2018, pp. 89–100. 39 Giles, ‘Review: “Economics for the Many, edited by John McDonnell”’. 40 P. Collinson, ‘Millennials Set to Reap Huge Rewards of Inheritance Boom’, The Guardian, 29 December 2017. 41 OECD Statistics on Income Distribution and Poverty (database). 42 For a good review, see Psychologists for Social Change, Universal Basic Income: A Psychological Impact Assessment, London: Psychologists against Austerity, 2017. 118 Notes 43 Cited in L.

In 2018 the Swiss bank Credit Suisse reported that the ranks of the ultra-rich in Britain swelled by 400 in the 12 months to summer 2018, taking the number with wealth of over $50 million (£38 million) to nearly 4,670.14 The bank said there were many more hovering just below that threshold. Reportedly the richest man in the country, with a self-revealed wealth of over £22 billion, Jim Ratcliffe (a Brexit advocate), just after receiving a knighthood, announced he was off to live in the tax haven of Monaco, so as to avoid paying tax. It is not just the top 1% of incomes that is at issue here. The top 5% has also bounded ahead to take a growing share of total income.15 The researchers in this study claimed that the relative stability of the Gini coefficient therefore implied that inequality had fallen ‘across the large majority of the income distribution’ over the previous decade.

Its assets now amount to over 300% of GDP, up from about 100% in the 1970s, while net public wealth has declined, partly due to a transfer of public to private wealth.35 And the concentration of private wealth has increased. While overall wealth has boomed, the poorest fifth of households have experienced a decline in wealth in real terms.36 Wealth inequality is also increasingly underestimated, partly because it has been easier to squirrel away financial wealth in tax havens and in fancy financial instruments beyond the reach of regulators and tax collectors. Globally, hidden financial wealth may account for 10% of the world’s GDP, and such is the scope for wealthy people in Britain to hide theirs that the UK is much above average in this respect.37 A conscientious study of international tax evasion and avoidance showed that UK unrecorded offshore wealth has grown rapidly since Slaying Giants with Basic Income 19 the 1980s and by much more than recorded onshore wealth.38 It is almost double what it is in other countries, amounting to almost 20% of GDP.


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

They were, nonetheless, resentful, yet the reasons given for that resentment often sounded suspiciously like an echo of the headlines that newspaper proprietors – non-British and resident in extra-territorial tax havens – had long been procuring from journalists who were more poisonously partisan than ever before. ‘Whole communities feel the benefits of globalisation have passed them by,’ said the commissioners. So why go on voting for MPs opposed to the active, redistributive policies needed to temper the negative effects of migration and globalisation? Why support a leave campaign whose instigators wanted the UK to become an unregulated tax haven? (Maybe it already was. The OECD found that fewer than a third of the fifty-six tax authorities it surveyed had dedicated units to oversee the tax affairs of the wealthy.

The government introduced unexplained wealth orders, which could be used to force high-value property owners who claimed limited income to explain themselves. Much hinged on enforcement. It was thought some 6,800 UK citizens controlled 12,000 firms from within low-tax jurisdictions. They were as tax-resistant as ever, with some 30 per cent of the UK’s estimated ninety-three billionaires having moved to tax havens. Backbench Tory MPs collaborated on legislation to force the UK’s own offshore tax havens in the English Channel and the Irish Sea to make their registers of company ownership fully searchable. But, at the very last moment, despite Brexit distractions, the May government withdrew the crucial clauses. Lobbying by the territories (or their clients) had evidently proved effective.

Westminster’s business rates raised £2.2 billion, while the Wirral’s raised only £70 million. Under Thatcher, business rates had been taken out of council control, but now they were to be returned, allowing central government to slash grants on the grounds that councils had their own revenue, though the amounts they could levy were severely restricted. Tax Havens The bullying power of the wealthy swells the more wealth they control. The rich and their representatives continually frighten chancellors with threats to offshore their money. But the facts of tax injustice became more glaring during the lost decade, and public indignation grew. When panjandrums met at Davos, they bewailed the inequalities of income and wealth but turned shy and retiring over their own tax-avoidance schemes.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Plender, ‘London’s Big Bang’, p. 46. 33. Davis and Walsh, ‘Role of the State’, p. 673. 34. Ibid. 35. J. Christensen, ‘The Looting Continues: Tax Havens and Corruption’, Critical Perspectives on International Business 7: 2 (2011), pp. 177–96, at p. 179. 36. Ibid., pp. 182, 186. 37. B. Quinn and J. Ball, ‘UK’s Top Companies Condemned for Prolific Use of Tax Havens’, Guardian, 12 May 2013. 38. M. Aubry and T. Dauphin, ‘Opening the Vaults: The Use of Tax Havens by Europe’s Biggest Banks’, 2017, p. 7 – pdf available at oxfam.org. 39. Bush et al., ‘Why Is the UK Banking System So Big’, p. 386. 40. D.

While increases in rates of value-added tax (VAT) were imposed on goods and (non-financial) services, financial and insurance services were made VAT-exempt.33 And in a move that benefited sectors, such as finance, that are light on physical assets as much as it disadvantaged manufacturing, the government funded cuts in corporation tax rates by removing capital investment allowances for machinery and plants.34 Finally, the UK government’s position on tax havens is critical. In policy terms, the government has not, of course, given explicit support to what is euphemistically called ‘efficient tax planning’ by UK-based banks; but until very recently, at least, it has done precious little to address the issue. As the tax campaigner John Christensen has noted, around half of all recognized tax havens are directly linked to the UK, through their status as Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies, or through membership of the Commonwealth.

While these jurisdictions ‘project the impression of autonomy’, many ‘act simply as booking centres for instructions issuing out of the City of London and other major financial centres’.35 These facts led Christensen, writing in 2011, to a striking conclusion: in reality, the UK government essentially ‘allows its Crown Dependencies to persist with facilitating tax evasion’; and, accordingly, the UK ‘merits being placed high on the list of most corrupt countries’.36 Research conducted in 2013 by the charity Action Aid into the use of tax havens by the UK’s 100 largest public companies found that the financial sector was comfortably ‘the most prolific user’. No fewer than six of the ten UK companies with the most subsidiaries in tax havens were financial institutions, four of them banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and RBS). Barclays had nearly 500 such subsidiaries – including, incredibly, over 120 in the Cayman Islands alone.37 More recent research, published in 2017 by another charity, Oxfam, showed that the situation was little improved: UK-based banks were still widely reporting assets, and the rentier profits they generated, in countries ‘with very low, or zero, corporate tax rates’.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

But the major obstacle to this— and one of the reasons for the asymmetry between the taxation of labor and capital—is the international mobility of capital, one of the core features of globalization. The worry is that raising the tax rate on income from capital would drive capital owners to invest it in other countries that have more favorable tax systems, as is notoriously the case with tax havens. In other words, there is a concern that tax evasion or optimization could shrink the tax base, resulting in a drop in tax revenue and in the volume of transfers to the lower end of the income distribution that these taxes make possible. We do not have very precise estimates for the elasticity of the tax base in relation to the tax rate.

The 55 cents figure is obtained by applying their calculation to the top of their range of estimates of the elasticity of taxable income. 7 This was prior to the recent reforms by the Hollande administration aimed at closing the gap between the taxation of labor and capital income. 5 162 Chapter 5 nancial wealth in developed countries is located in tax havens, with this number logically being substantially higher for high incomes and large fortunes.8 Beyond a certain threshold of taxation, international coordination would become necessary if taxation is to be used to help correct for rising inequalities in rich countries. This is definitely a key issue.

In particular, it is quite possible that the developed world is caught in a race toward the bottom in progressive taxation matters, each nation protecting itself against mobility by weakening its tax system. If this is the case, then only some form of international coordination may solve the problem. From that point of view, the recent initiatives by G20 countries to regulate the international activity of banks and the flow of capital to tax havens are encouraging. Recent initiatives by the United States to reduce tax evasion, the current negotiations between Switzerland, the United States, and some European countries to re-­establish some transparency also go in the right direction. They could also be the sign that another kind of globalization is coming into being in the area of capital flows control.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Figure 10.1 is for those with a GDP greater than $300 billion in 2007 (from Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman, “Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens? Macro Evidence and Implications for Global Inequality,” Journal of Public Economics 162 (2018): 89–100. The figure was produced by Gabriel Zucman, available at https://gabriel-zucman.eu/offshore/ (accessed September 2018). 20.  Alstadsæter, Johannesen, and Zucman, “Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens?,” p. 100. 21.  This reasoning is from James Mirrlees and Stuart Adam, Dimensions of Tax Design: The Mirrlees Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 757. 22.  Alstadsæter, Johannesen, and Zucman, “Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens?,” figure 5. Figure is adapted from one produced by Gabriel Zucman, available at https://gabriel-zucman.eu/offshore/ (accessed September 2018). 23.  

But in a world with less work, traditional capital will start to matter far more. A critical first step in taxing traditional capital will be achieving clarity regarding where that capital is located and who actually holds it. At the moment, its location is often unclear. Since the 1970s, the amount of household wealth held offshore, often in tax havens, has shot up; today, it stands at about 10 percent of global GDP, though, as Figure 10.1 shows, there is a lot of variation across countries.19 Tracing the owners of traditional capital is not an easy exercise, either. Apart from Switzerland, no major financial center publishes detailed statistics on the amount of foreign wealth held by its banks.

To put this in context, in Ireland (where Apple’s tax bill was due), citizens with the lowest incomes paid their tax at a rate four thousand times higher than that.26 In the United States, the effective tax rate paid by US-owned companies to the American government has fallen consistently over the last few decades, even though the nominal tax rate—the one actually set by law—has been steady since the 1990s. Gabriel Zucman, the leading scholar of these trends, estimates that the effective tax rate paid by businesses to the US government fell by 10 percent between 1998 and 2013, with about two-thirds of that reduction due to increased tax avoidance. Again, tax havens play an important role in enabling this: since 1984, the share of US corporate profits reported in places like the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Bermuda, Singapore, and Switzerland has increased more than eightfold.27 Tax avoidance by large corporations usually does not break the letter of the law governing corporate taxation, though it frequently offends the spirit of the law.


pages: 237 words: 72,716

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

Specifically, he advocates that capital equipment should be expensed immediately and the corporate tax rate lowered to 25% to be globally competitive because “what makes blue-collar people able to sustain a reasonable standard of living, the investment in the industrial sector, and that is treated poorly by our tax code and our government policy.” 176 T. Raffel and G. Samuels Deficit reduction has motivated Western governments to tackle tax havens, which coincidentally may help address wealth inequalities when stricter tax enforcement captures more unreported earnings. Monks and Rasmussen advocate stronger tax regimes and higher progressive income taxes in countries with comparatively lower rates. “We need to solve the tax haven problem and taxation problem,” advises Rasmussen. “We need to ensure that capital income is treated in principle the same way as labor income, which will mean an increase in taxation, I admit that.

., I remember my fellow British students were saying they didn’t want to work in the U.K. at any price! So too much redistribution through tax is killing the generation of economic value. And when people can move around, then you cannot tax them significantly more than the average worldwide tax rate, or even much more than what the acceptable tax havens would do. So that doesn’t work anymore. 24 B. Collomb Do we have other means to reduce inequality? If redistribution doesn’t work, can you reduce inequality at the source of revenue? Social consensus, maybe? If it’s not acceptable, or if it’s considered to be excessive to make too much money, will inequality be curbed?

It’s always difficult to ask a business person to recommend a higher tax level, so I’m not sure I would recommend it, but I think it will happen and I won’t fight against it in the U.S. In France, I would fight it because we are already at a level which is too high. I guess things which are being done against tax havens are going to improve the inequality situation. Things which are being done against corruption are going to improve the inequality situation. But if we have again a growing economy, if we have a lively economy, there will be still a lot of opportunities to make a lot of money by having a good idea and developing it.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

The other important advantage of border taxes is that they make corporate tax avoidance difficult. If the same set of rules on expenses and exports vs imports are in operation in a country, firms will find geography irrelevant because they will no longer be able to exploit tax avoidance schemes like inter-company loans and holding assets in tax havens. Similarly, more and more countries will find it to their advantage to adopt such a scheme to avoid revenue loss, or perhaps to appear as competitive as other economies with border taxes in operation. Border taxes, also known as the destination-based cash flow tax The Executive Summary of ‘Destination Based Cash Flow Tax’ (Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, paper of the same title (WP17/01), January 2017, by Auerbach et al.) describes the concept as follows1: The DBCFT has two basic components.

While we are not fiscal experts we would make four suggestions where higher tax revenues might be found, i.e. corporation tax; land value taxation; carbon tax; a destination-based cash-flow tax (DBCFT)—the latter having already been mentioned in Chapter 12, Sect. 12.2.2. 13.2.1 Reforming the Basis of Corporation Tax There has been much Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), the latter from international competition, notably via tax havens, especially in the case of companies providing digital services, in recent decades. This has severely cut the proceeds of corporation taxes, particularly in large economies, and probably well below the social optimum. The OECD’s main proposal (‘Secretariat Proposal for a “Unified Approach” Under Pillar One’, October 2019) is to shift the nexus of such corporate taxation, at least for digital companies, from physical presence to sales within the country.

The OECD’s main proposal (‘Secretariat Proposal for a “Unified Approach” Under Pillar One’, October 2019) is to shift the nexus of such corporate taxation, at least for digital companies, from physical presence to sales within the country. If this reform becomes adopted, which will not be known by the time this book goes to print, it could sharply raise the tax take from corporate taxation in most large economies, and lessen the attraction of tax havens. 13.2.2 A Land Tax A canal cruise in Amsterdam usually raises eyebrows. Not just for the famously tilted buildings, but also when one realises that buildings were taxed by their width and the size of the windows. The most tax-efficient buildings along the canal are thus ones with barely a few feet for the front façade.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

Rayment, The Resistible Rise of Market Fundamentalism: Rethinking Development Policy in an Unbalanced World (London: Zed Books and Third World Network, 2007), Chapter 4, for an excellent review of the evidence. 16. On tax havens, see N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Vintage, 2012), and the website of Tax Justice Network, www.taxjustice.net. At the time of writing (autumn 2013), there has been a lot of talk of a clamp-down on tax havens, especially through the G20, but no concrete action has been taken. 17. Christian Aid, ‘The shirts off their backs: how tax policies fleece the poor’, September 2005, downloadable from: http://www.christianaid.org.uk/images/the_shirts_off_their_backs.pdf. 18.

Here we will look at income per capita figures, given that we have already talked a lot about overall output figures, such as GDP and GNP, that are identical to overall income figures in theory and are very similar to them in practice. Countries that we typically know as the richest countries have over $40,000 per capita income According to the World Bank, in 2010, the country with the highest income (GNI) per capita in the world was Monaco ($197,460), followed by Liechtenstein ($136,540). However, both these are tax havens with tiny populations (33,000 and 36,000 respectively). So, if we exclude countries with a population of less than half a million, Norway, with a per capita income of $85,380, is the richest country (that is, it has the highest per capita GNI). A selection of the richest countries is listed in Table 6.1.

* These companies minimized their tax obligations in countries like Britain by inflating the costs for their British subsidiaries by having their subsidiaries in third countries ‘over-charge’ (that is, charge more than what they would have in open markets) the British subsidiaries for their services. These third countries were countries with a corporate tax rate that is lower than the UK rate (e.g., Ireland, Switzerland or the Netherlands) or even tax havens, namely, countries that attract foreign companies to set up ‘paper companies’ by charging very low, or even no, corporate taxes (e.g., Bermuda, the Bahamas).16 The age-old trick of transfer pricing Taking advantage of the fact that they operate in countries with different tax rates, TNCs have their subsidiaries over-charge or under-charge each other – sometimes grossly – so that profits are highest in those subsidiaries operating in countries with the lowest corporate tax rates.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

The purpose of Anderson Strathern Nominees Ltd is thus merely to hold the shares of Buccleuch Estates Ltd on behalf of others. Who those others are remains a mystery.1 The use of the names of companies incorporated overseas has been seen by some as a particular problem. An investigation published in 2012 disclosed that, since 1999, some 95,000 companies had been established in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands specifically to hold British properties, conferring on the actual owners not only significant tax advantages but ‘the privilege of not having their names made public’. The investigation found that, while some of the real owners do live abroad, many also live in Britain.

As recently as 2001, a scathing assessment of the existing rules, and of their tendency to privilege ‘privacy over transparency’, was written by a Treasury official.3 But the Blair government rejected his recommendations.4 And when the latest phase of Scottish land reform enjoyed safe passage through Holyrood in March 2016, it had notable deficits. Amendments including one that would have prevented landownership via offshore tax havens were voted down.5 Still, in the past two years, there have definitely been signs of progress. Mid 2016 saw the introduction of a People with Significant Control (PSC) register for companies incorporated in the United Kingdom, requiring them to provide information annually about who their ‘people with significant control’ really are.

Given David Cameron’s promise in 2016 to crack down on private British property ‘being bought by people overseas through anonymous shell companies, using plundered or laundered cash’, this is nothing if not hypocritical.4 In a brilliant piece of investigative research, Anna Powell-Smith has revealed that even in the short period of time between the summer of 2017 and April 2018, public land worth more than £100 million was sold to companies registered in tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions such as Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Cayman Islands. Some of these companies, Powell-Smith suspects, are UK-based developers using offshore vehicles. Others appear to have no substantive pre-existing UK connection to speak of, including one – a ‘classic anonymous BVI company’ – that bought a west London site from the Mayor of London’s office for £6.8 million.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

These problems are similar or even more serious in other countries and are reflected in two discrepancies between household surveys and macrodata: first, income and consumption reported from household surveys do not fully match household private income and consumption calculated from national accounts (that is, from GDP calculations), and second, statistical discrepancies (called errors and omissions) occur in balance of payments data because of, among other things, money transferred to tax havens (see Zucman 2013, 2015), which, for obvious reasons, is unlikely to be reported in surveys. It is therefore safe to say that household surveys underestimate the number of people who are poor (whatever the definition of poverty) and the number of people who are rich, and their incomes. Lakner and Milanovic (2013) try to adjust globally for the latter, but any such adjustment, while useful, contains a very large degree of arbitrariness due to the simple fact that we know next to nothing about people who refuse to participate in surveys.

For income, we have three estimates: first, the conservative one, based on household surveys alone, which (as discussed in Excursus 1.1) tend to miss the richest people and thus underestimate the share of the top 1 percent; second, an estimate which includes an adjustment that tries to correct for this problem; and third, an estimate that includes an additional correction for hidden global wealth (assets held in tax havens).22 For the third estimate, we assume a rather strong (6 percent) return on the hidden assets, and we assume that all hidden assets belong to the global top 1 percent.23 The income share of the richest 1 percent of people in 2010 increases from 15.7 percent under the first scenario, to 28 percent when we make an adjustment for top income underestimation in surveys, to 29 percent when we make an additional adjustment for income from hidden wealth.

Globalization makes increased taxation of the most significant contributor to inequality—namely, capital income—very difficult, and without a fully concerted action from most countries, which does not seem even remotely possible today, highly improbable. Simply put, capital is hard to tax because it is so mobile, and the countries that benefit from this mobility have no incentive to help those that lose out. Tax havens exist not only in microstates, but in large countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Think, for example, about the recent unwillingness of the United States to investigate and extradite Chinese citizens accused of embezzlement by their government (66 out of 100 of the “most wanted” people accused of economic crimes by the Chinese government are thought to be hiding in the United States and Canada),2 or London brokers all too eager to accept Russian money regardless of its origin.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Invariably, it all revolves around the question: Which knowledge and skills do today’s students need to get hired in tomorrow’s job market – the market of 2030? Which is precisely the wrong question. In 2030, there will likely be a high demand for savvy accountants untroubled by a conscience. If current trends hold, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland will become even bigger tax havens, enabling multinationals to dodge taxes even more effectively, leaving developing countries with an even shorter end of the stick. If the aim of education is to roll with these kinds of trends rather than upend them, then egotism is set to be the quintessential 21st-century skill. Not because the law or the market or technology demand it, but solely because that, apparently, is how we prefer to earn our money.

The prevalence of the terms “GNP” and “GDP” in books published in English, 1930–2008 Initially, the more common measure was the gross national product (GNP), but in the 1970s this was superseded by the GDP. The GNP adds up all a country’s economic activity (including activities abroad), while the GDP adds up all activities within its borders (including by foreign enterprises). In the U.S., the gap between GNP and GDP is never more than a few percent, but in tax havens, it’s a different story. Ireland is a good example: Where its GNP and GDP were still about equal in 1980, by 2009 Ireland’s GNP was one-fifth the size of its GDP because the GDP had since been inflated by billions in foreign capital. Source: Google Ngram As one historian explains, “The first thing you do in 1950s and ‘60s if you’re a new nation is you open a national airline, you create a national army, and you start measuring GDP.”23 But that last item became progressively trickier.

Major dilemmas such as how to structure a democracy or what a country needs to prosper, can’t be answered by an RCT, let alone solved by throwing some cash at the problem. To fixate on all those clever studies is to forget that the most effective anti-poverty measures happen elsewhere in the economic food chain. The OECD estimates that poor countries lose three times as much to tax evasion as they receive in foreign aid.16 Measures against tax havens, for example, could potentially do far more good than well-meaning aid programs ever could. We could even think on a bigger scale than that. Imagine there was a single measure that could wipe out all poverty everywhere, raising everybody in Africa above our Western poverty line, and in the process put a few extra months’ salary in our pockets too.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Meanwhile, the 1 percent have benefited the most from these policies, pocketing 95 percent of income growth in the first three years after the crisis.15 In addition, the 1 percent have the expertise and means to play the global system to their advantage, an example of which is the use of tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Leaks such as the Panama Papers offer only a minuscule glimpse into this parallel universe. According to estimates, about 8 percent of global wealth, or $7.5 trillion, is squirreled away in tax havens, $6 trillion of which has not been taxed.16 This hidden wealth distorts the picture of inequality, which if factored in would likely be even greater.17 Approaching the Tipping Point The situation is so egregious that even members of the establishment have begun going rogue.

“The Gini Index,” World Bank, 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI. 15. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 15, Kindle edition. 16. Libby Nelson, “A Top Expert on Tax Havens Explains Why the Panama Papers Barely Scratch the Surface,” Vox, April 16, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11371712/panama-papers-tax-haven-zucman. 17. Das, The Age of Stagnation, 208. 18. Kali Holloway, “Gordon Gekko for Bernie: Inspiration for “Wall Street” Villain Endorses Sanders for President,” Salon, March 12, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/03/12/gordon_gecko_for_bernie_master_of_the_universe_endorses_sanders_for_president_partner. 19.

Treasury Department, 20, 30, 35, 45, 47 V Value of Connections in Turbulent Times, The, 45 Vanguard, 179 Vanity Fair, 56, 160 Vekselberg, Viktor, 144 Venture capitalist industry, 149–150 Venture philanthropy, 76 Verifiable information, 40 Video conferences, 99 Violet & Daisy, 201 Vodafone Group, 142 Vogue, 160 Volcker, Paul, 107, 125–126 Volkswagen, 224 W Wachovia, 140 Wage gap, 153–154 Wall Street description of, 46, 165 excessive compensation on, 221 male-dominant nature of, 148 Washington and, relationship between, 176 Wall Street, 212, 221 Wall Street II, 24, 47 Wall Street Journal, 17, 67, 72, 158, 200 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 218–219 Warburg Pincus, 165 Warren, Elizabeth, 153, 225, 227 Warsh, Kevin, 36 Washington Post, 2, 91 Wauthier, Pierre, 138, 144 Wealth. See also Money displays of, 60 exclusivity associated with, 77 family accumulation of, 123 global, 211 status affected by, 22 in tax havens, 211 Wealth gap finance as reason for, 12 globalization effects on, 213 Institute for New Economic Thinking discussions about, 107 unethical behavior and, 222 in United States, 210–211 Weber, Axel, 42, 120 Weill, Sandy, 57, 65, 91, 140, 167, 203 Welch, Jack, 125, 135 Wellington, 44 Wells Fargo, 140 West, Cornel, 187 Weymouth, Lally, 2, 91 When the Genius Failed, 208 WHO.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

The failed liberal slogan for the world that sounded so loudly in the afterclap of communism’s fall – ‘democracy and the free market’ – lacks the Hood kicker: democracy, trade, and fairly shared wealth. The scale to measure the success of globalisation shouldn’t be how easily the wealthiest can suck rents from the majority and keep the proceeds through a combination of capital mobility, tax havens and wage suppression, by shuffling production, populations and profits from national jurisdiction to national jurisdiction. It should be by how far the world as a whole approaches a high baseline of shared security and prosperity, within which cultural distinctiveness can flourish – how far Indonesia or China or Egypt are reaching up to establish universal networks like education, healthcare, housing, water and energy supply, and whether Britain, the United States or Italy are levelling down.

They rent apartments.’ Criticism of the special economic zone system, which involves Poland essentially buying jobs on the global investment market in exchange for billions of euros in foregone corporation tax, is being heard more frequently from the Polish left. ‘You can think of them as industrial tax havens,’ said Iwo Augustynski, a Wrocław-based economist and activist with the left-wing party Razem. ‘When you look at levels of corporation tax in the EU, Poland has one of the lowest. When you look at the special economic zones, it’s effectively zero.’ You might assume that, because Skarbimierz is part of the Wałbrzych zone, it must be part of the town of Wałbrzych, or at least next to it.

Britain was not to be one of those countries while the Conservatives were in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to place around the globe is one of the areas where Britain was keen to help. The Robin Hood Tax isn’t a bad idea. Introduced by enough wealthy countries, and with enough pressure put on the tax havens they protect, it could be a forerunner to the far more radical global tax on capital proposed by Thomas Piketty as a way to ease the extremes of inequality built into the capitalist system. The idea goes back at least to Keynes. But the fact modern supporters chose to name it after the legendary hero of Sherwood Forest is a marker of how popular thinking about taxation has changed.


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

It was upsetting to think of frail, elderly people freezing in their homes because they didn’t want to move. London’s relatively lax tax laws for foreign corporations and individuals and its strong links with offshore dependencies have led to claims that the capital is now the biggest tax haven in the world. In his book Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson describes London as the centre of a spider’s web that links to the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the Caribbean.19 This impression of super prime London as a tax haven to rival Monaco is borne out by the everyday experience of residents. Helen Kirwan-Taylor, a journalist who writes for the Sunday Times, lives on one of the most prestigious roads in Notting Hill.

Lock, Grant, ‘Digging deep: RBKC to undermine stability of Basement Permitted Development Rights?’, Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners, 20 May 2015, http://nlpplanning.com/blog/digging-deep-rbkc-to-undermine-stability-of-basement-permitted-development-rights/ 19. Shaxson, Nicholas, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, Vintage, 2012 20. Butler, Tim and Lees, Loretta, ‘Super-gentrification in Barnsbury, London: globalization and gentrifying global elites at the neighbourhood level’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 31, Issue 4, pp. 467–87, December 2006 21.


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

Many newly independent states in the Global South didn’t have the power to boost domestic industry as the Chinese state did, so foreign direct investment was focused on multinationals extracting commodities from these countries, and surplus value from their workers, while reshoring the profits to the Global North, paying off domestic capitalists and functionaries for the privilege. The profits from production undertaken in the imperial periphery were sucked into asset markets in the global North – often via tax havens – supporting the process of financialisation and deepening inequalities between global North and South.22 The finance-led growth regime that has emerged over the course of the last forty years is not the first unique mode of accumulation in the history of capitalism. The one it replaced has variously been called the post-war, social democratic, or Keynesian consensus.23 Under this growth model – underpinned by an increase in the power of labour relative to capital that emerged from the Second World War and the institutionalisation of this political settlement both domestically through the rise of state planning and internationally with the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions – the state committed itself to promoting full employment through public spending.

In fact, these measures simply made it easier for multinational corporations to enter the economies of the Global South and displace domestic capitalists before reshoring their profits to the Global North. It also made it easier for elites to siphon their cash out of the country and store it abroad, often in tax havens. Meanwhile, domestic producers faced huge barriers to exporting their goods on a global market weighted towards core countries, which used their huge resources to protect their domestic producers. But it is not simply the Global South that has been harmed by financial globalisation. Capital flows from the periphery into the imperial core have also warped the economies of core countries15 and increased the risk of financial crisis.16 According to textbook economic theory, large imbalances between creditor countries with large current account surpluses and debtors with large current account deficits should be self-correcting.


pages: 444 words: 151,136

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

Quite a bit of wealth escapes taxation entirely, either from the use of offshore havens or from illegal activities that are cash oriented. The OECD estimates that between $5 trillion and $7 trillion, or 6 to 8 percent of total global assets under management (AUM) resides in tax havens, with $1.4 trillion of this in the Cayman Islands alone. The Tax Justice Network suggests that tax revenue lost to tax havens is about one-quarter trillion dollars annually, with about $100 billion of this being in avoidance of taxes in the United States. By comparison, the total taxes collected from the roughly one million returns filed by households in the top tax bracket were $345 billion in 2006.

Double taxation still exists. It is essential to appreciate that those who pay capital gains are doing so on money that is residual to the prior application of corporate or individual tax rates—unless that individual hails from the über-rich and can make use of borrowing or derivatives or perhaps even a foreign tax haven. To enjoy the low capital gains tax rate, such assets typically exist in a structure such as a domestic C-corporation or a commercial real estate direct investment or partnership. The former is taxed at a 35 percent rate pretty much across the board, and the latter would generate rental income subject to the regular tax table.

Anecdotal evidence of evasion surfaced once again recently when in July 2008 UBS announced that accounts for 20,000 U.S. clients opened through its private bankers in Switzerland would need to be closed amid investigations by the United States.7 Considering The Rich are Different from You and Me 173 that only an estimated 250,000 households earn greater than $500,000 per year, might one generalize that the border fence in place to discourage capital flight looks like, ahem, Swiss cheese? Given that this is for one bank and one highly visible tax haven, does it not take much imagination to conjure up hundreds of thousands of such accounts? In February 2009, UBS entered into a $780 million settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Although billed as a massive victory for the U.S. government, in reality UBS has agreed to name a mere 250 clients, and perhaps as many as 400 among the 20,000.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

They thought they were doing all they could. As had she, before Frank caught her. She asked if their banks really knew who their depositors were, even when their records were not damaged. They looked puzzled at this. I ask, Mary said, getting irritated (Frank had been more than irritated), because your banks are often regarded as tax havens, because of their secret accounts. Other countries lose tax money which gets put in secret accounts here. So you’re rich in part because you’re the bagman for criminals worldwide. A kind of organized theft. People are supposed to trust money, but then a lot of it gets stolen, by the very structure of money itself.

She might even have stood up if she could have mustered the energy. She might have shouted. It was time for redemption for Switzerland, she told them flatly, keeping right inside the line of civility. Or maybe on the edge of it. All that stuff you want to forget as if it never happened, the Nazi gold, the Jewish gold, the tax havens for oligarchs and kleptocrats, the secret bank accounts for criminals of all kinds. It’s time to end all that. End the secrecy in your banks. Blockchain all your money, and put all your ill-gotten gains to good use. Leverage it for good. Forge an alliance with all the other small prosperous countries that can’t save the world by themselves.

A regressive tax takes more, proportionally to individual wealth, from the poorest. Income taxes tax individual or corporate annual income, so these incomes are often manipulated by those earning them to appear lower than they really are. Various deferments and reinvestments and other methods slip money through tax loopholes, and tax havens are places where money, if it can be moved there before the annual accounting takes place, will not be taxed by the haven’s host, or will be taxed much less. So a progressive income tax can become quite ineffective as such. Vigilance in application is required. At certain moments in history excess personal wealth was frowned on, and the scale of progressive taxation grew quite steep.


pages: 327 words: 90,013

Boundless: The Rise, Fall, and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by Nick Kostov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, bitcoin, business logic, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, Masayoshi Son, offshore financial centre, rolodex, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, the payments system

His passion in life was learning languages; he could converse in Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew, as well as in French, English, and Arabic. Despite the physical distance between them in their professional years, Ghosn and Gebran remained closely entangled, due to the lawyer’s specialization in a narrow, albeit globe-spanning, field of expertise: tax havens. At a business seminar near Paris in 2011, he had extolled the virtues of offshore companies over traditional corporations, praising Lebanon’s decision not to ban them. Lebanon was enforcing a strict version of banking secrecy, allowing for huge amounts to crisscross its financial system anonymously.

See Jaoude, Amal Abou Brasilensis (offshore company), 127 failing health of, 145–46 Ghosn as client of, 126, 146–47 Good Faith Investments and, 127–28 handling Ghosn divorce, 125 money transfers for Ghosn, 132–33, 148 Navetta 37 yacht Shachou and, 266 passing of, 149 setting up law firm, 125 tax haven expertise, 125–26 Gebran, Ziad, 145–47, 150 General Motors, 76, 156, 272 Gharios, Elie, 22 Ghosn, Abdo Bichara (grandfather) arriving in Amazonian jungle, 7–8 children, 10–11 descendants, 11 growing business, 10 as Maronite Christian, 9 parting advice, 11 railroad endeavor, 8 in the United States, 9 Ghosn, Anthony (son).

See also Suhail Bahwan Automobiles (SBA) Kume, Hiroshi, 59–61 Lagarde, Christine, 107 Latham & Watkins, 140, 172, 174 Lawrence Academy, 230–31 Le Borgne, Jean-Yves, 266 Le Grèves, Frédérique, 143, 153 Le Maire, Bruno, 201, 207 Le Puy-en-Velay, France, 34 Lebanese Press Syndicate, 256 Lebanon civil war in, 29 Ghosn’s privileged life in, 15 judicial officials, 267 Ministry of Justice, 257 tax havens and, 125–26 Lehman Brothers, 88 Les Trente Glorieuses, 29 Lesort, Fabien, 186, 189 Lewis, C. S., 164–65 Lonsdale, Joe, 130 Lott, Trent, 120 Lutz, Bob, 43, 56, 66 Ma Cocotte restaurant, 161 Maaraoui, Alain, 129, 149 Macron, Emmanuel, 137, 139, 140–41, 199 Manaus, Brazil, 8 Mandarin Oriental hotel, 89–90 Maronite Christians, 9 Marshall, Jim, 75 Masaas, Boulos, 16 Matsui, Tomoyuki, 239, 244–45, 247 Mazda, 50 the McKinsey way, 34–35 Michelin Brazilian market, 36–37 Chahid-Nouraï coaches Ghosn, 34–35 as family-run company, 33–34 Ghosn as head of heavy-duty tires research and development, 35 Ghosn as youngest plant manager for, 34 Ghosn in Brazil, 37–38 Ghosn mentoring Édouard, 44–45 Ghosn resigns from, 45–46 headquarters for, 33 Kléber-Colombes and, 35 reaching out to Ghosn, 31 Uniroyal Goodrich merger with.


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

“Only morons pay the estate tax”: Bess Levin, “Gary Cohn Thinks You’d Have to be a ‘Moron’ to Pay the Estate Tax,” Vanity Fair, August 29, 2017. Enter South Dakota: This section, and the quoted material in it, draws from Oliver Bullough, “The Great American Tax Haven: Why the Super-Rich Love South Dakota,” Guardian, November 14, 2019. “Aristocracy was back”: Bullough, “Great American Tax Haven.” “To some, South Dakota is a ‘fly-over’ state”: Ibid. “The voters don’t have a clue”: Ibid. “done a pretty good job”: Ibid. As baby boomers die in the coming decades: Mark Hall, “The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History: What’s Happening and What Are the Implications,” Forbes, November 11, 2019.

Building on this success, Janklow turned to lifting the cap on intergenerational wealth transfers. With a brief law—just nineteen words—he abolished the rule against perpetuities for assets nominally held in South Dakota trusts. As journalist Oliver Bullough wrote on South Dakota’s emergence as a global tax haven, “Aristocracy was back in the game.” South Dakota began advertising itself as the place to set up dynasty trusts, offering families the ability to perpetuate their wealth while helping them to avoid inheritance taxes. Suddenly South Dakota became the premier global money magnet. “To some, South Dakota is a ‘fly-over’ state,” said the chief justice of the state supreme court, speaking before the legislature.

“We don’t pay taxes”: “Maid Testifies Helmsley Denied Paying Taxes,” New York Times, July 12, 1989. “The dog is the only thing”: “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way to Stay ‘Queen of Mean’ ” (editorial), Chicago Sun-Times, August 31, 2007. “No more questions”: Bullough, “Great American Tax Haven.” The bottom line: Alina Tegund, “There’s More to Estate Planning Than Just the Will,” New York Times, September 5, 2014. From Shared Sacrifice to Self-Sacrifice: The private law theory animating this section is developed in Carolyn J. Frantz and Hanoch Dagan, “Properties of Marriage,” Columbia Law Review 104 (2004): 75–133, and in Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller, The Choice Theory of Contracts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 60–61, 121–22.


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

With somewhat spurious precision, the estate agent Frank Knight recently reported that there were now some 4,224 UHNWI families living in London alone in 2014, and that they expected some 5,000 families with liquid assets exceeding $30 million to be calling the city their (sometime) home by 2024. The attraction is not just in London’s history, nightlife or convenient time zone – it is chiefly the country’s lax tax regime. As Pippa Malmgren, one-time economic adviser to George Bush, puts it: ‘The crackdown on tax havens in Switzerland has removed these old options for new capital. As a result, there has been a huge influx of global capital into the UK.’7 Famously, the best-off segment of the UHNWIs, numbering just eighty-five people worldwide, held almost half the wealth of the richest 300 by January 2013 – some $1.7 trillion dollars, which was the same as was held by the poorest half of the world’s population, or some 3.6 billion people.

Thus, taxation of the beneficiaries of gifts in general, and other forms of capital gains has risen, and attention has begun to focus on the potential for land taxes.105 The taxation of other forms of property, such as pharmaceutical patents, also needs urgent attention. Any form of wealth-hoarding that harms the well-being of others is now seen as a very legitimate source of public concern. Pudelek Luxembourg, tax haven and home to Amazon.com There are many good signs that the times are changing, but also some indicators that a fightback has already begun. In 2013 one ‘wealth management firm’ reported that it had ‘established an internal university to train our advisors on recent tax, legal, financial, and regulatory innovations’106 – implicitly signalling an intention to avoid taxation.

Dorling, ‘Fairness and the Changing Fortunes of People in Britain’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 176: 1 (2013), at onlinelibrary.wiley.com. 13. Capgemini and RBC, ‘World Wealth Report’, p. 18, refers in turn to ‘Outlook 2013’, Art Market Update, Fine Art Fund Group, January 2013. 14. N. Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (London: Bodley Head, 2011). 15. J. Hills, F. Bastagli, F. Cowell, H. Glennerster, E. Karagiannaki and A. McKnight, Wealth in the UK: Distribution, Accumulation and Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16. K. Roberts, Class in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 169–92.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

., “HIV / AIDS”, Our World in Data, Apr. 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids 46 Deaton, A., The Great Escape (Princeton University Press, 2013), pg. 115 47 Ibid., pg. 278 48 Hickel, J., The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality, (Windmill Books, 2018) pg. 30 49 Kar, D., “Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People”, Global Financial Integrity, Dec. 2015, pg. xi, https://gfintegrity.org/report/financial-flows-and-tax-havens-combining-to-limit-the-lives-of-billions-of-people 50 Hickel, J., The Divide, pg. 29 51 Norberg, J., Progress, pg. 135. 52 Winthrop, R. and McGivney, E., “Why Wait 100 Years? Bridging the Gap in Global Education”, Brookings Institution, 10 Jun. 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-wait-100-years-bridging-the-gap-in-global-education/ 53 Cuba had 11.18 mean years of schooling in 2011 (last available year) compared to 9.54 in Chile (and still only 10.58 in 2017), while Vietnam had 7.61 years in 2009 (latest available) compared to 7.72 in Thailand in 2010.

Yet another contradiction between the liberal view on politics and economics is that while we have demanded greater transparency and accountability for the actions of public officials, we have been more than happy to ensure anything involving private money is as opaque as can be as recent exposures of tax haven wealth leaks also show (this being yet another issue that liberal governments constantly pretend to want to address but never actually do so). By far the most important event in the rise of modern corporate lobbying is the disastrous Citizens United v FEC US Supreme Court decision in January 2010, and the lesser-known but complementary SpeechNOW v FEC decision just a few weeks later.

One is the “global savings glut” described by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and driven by excess savings by certain economies (namely China, oil producers like Saudi Arabia, and Germany).5 Another is “secular stagnation”, a Depression-era hypothesis recently revived by Lawrence Summers, which is caused by low population growth, reduced capital intensity of new industries, and low prices of capital goods.6 Yet the extraordinary investments needed to combat climate change suggest that there should be no shortage of opportunities for climate-conscious investors. Unfortunately, the complete mismatch of where global capitalism’s trillions of investable wealth ends up (unproductive but lucrative housing markets, risky third-world corporate debt, safe first-world public debt, or simply stashed away in tropical island tax havens) and where it should (clean energy, green infrastructure, social investments) is possibly the most serious indication of how modern capitalism is unfit for the challenge of climate change, or any challenge that requires prioritizing environmental and social needs rather than treating them as consequential to interest rates being in equilibrium with the profit motive of each individual firm.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Some very large and profitable enterprises, such as Apple and Google, have been able to pay very low taxes, because of the way they have arranged their global accounts, taking advantage of legal loopholes in the tax systems, loopholes that the lobbyists for the enterprises had been able to insert in the tax laws, in the past and taking advantage of the existence of so-called tax havens. (See various articles in Pogge and Mehta, 2016.) For many enterprises, the determination of the taxable incomes and of the tax liabilities has become a contentious issue. Tax avoidance connected with these global activities, especially with those involving some use of intellectual capital, has been estimated to amount to hundreds of billions of dollars and has been increasingly worrying the governments of many countries.

The now-common economic operations in multiple countries’ activities, by both some HNWIs and especially by large corporations, have made it easier to use tax planning to exploit opportunities to both legally reduce tax liabilities and also to occasionally engage in explicit tax evasion. (See, for example, various papers in a recent book edited by Pogge and Mehta, 2016.) The existence of many tax havens, the lack of harmonization of tax rates among countries, and the possibility of shifting profits (far more easily than real operations) from countries with high income tax rates to those with low, or even zero, tax rates have made it easy for some companies 370 Termites of the State and for rich individuals to sharply reduce the taxes that they pay to the governments of the countries where they reside.

Another was that globalization of economic activities, then underway, was opening economies to greater global influences and was making capital more mobile than it had been earlier, when the countries’ economies had been closed. Globalization was making the supply of capital to a country potentially more elastic with respect to its tax rate. Capital was acquiring stronger incentives to move from countries with high tax rates to countries with low tax rates, and especially to those with no taxes, the “tax havens.” Globalization was also creating incentives for some, especially small, countries to engage in tax competition by lowering their tax rates, or by offering other tax incentives to attract foreign capital to them. Because, by that time, globalization and low tax rates had come to be seen as positive developments by many economists, and because equity had started to become less important as a policy objective than efficiency, there was the beginning of pressures on governments to reduce taxes, and especially to reduce the taxes on incomes from capital sources.


Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

The Problem with Interest, 2nd Edition. London: Kerotac, pp. 8-10 73 Pettifor, A., (2006) The Coming First World Debt Crisis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapter 5, pp. 120-144 74 Davies (2002). op. cit. p. 252 75 Ferguson (2008). op. cit. pp. 165-18 76 Shaxson, N., (2010). Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World. London: Random House. 77 Ingham (2004). op. cit. p. 129 78 Carruthers, B. G., (1996). City of Capital. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 71-83 79 Carruthers (1996) op. cit., p. 130 80 Ibid. 81 Ferguson (2008). op. cit. Chapter 2 82 Pressnell, L.S., (1956).

As such, its impact is determined by whoever decides what it is (the unit of account), who issues it, how much of it is issued to whom and for what purpose. The unit of account function continues to be determined primarily by the state, as it has been for at least four thousand years.7 The state is able to do this simply because we live in societies where, even accepting the presence of vast efforts devoted to off-shoring and tax-haven activities, with the associated vast stores of wealth that simply never come within the oversight of the state in any real sense, most of us have to make regular payments to the state in the form of taxation. If people and firms know they must make regular payments denominated in a certain way, it makes perfect sense to use such a denomination equally for their own transactions.

For a useful guide to the historical use of interest see Pettifor (2006)73 * The City of London Corporation, the municipal authority for London’s financial district, has unusual powers to this day, often expressed in ceremonial oddities such as the granting of ‘permission’ from the Lord Mayor for the Queen to cross the City boundaries, as well as unique features of more practical importance such as the ability of corporations and partnerships to vote in elections; its own police and the power to amend its own constitution. For fascinating detail about the ‘offshore tax haven’ in the middle of London, see Chapter 12 of Shaxson (2010)76. * See Galbraith (1975)85 for a brief review of the debate. The Banking versus Currency school debate was later continued in the main dividing line in twentieth-century monetary theory between the Monetarist school who believed the Government could determine the money supply exogenously through changing the base rate and the neo- or post-Keynesian school which viewed credit creation as ‘endogenously’ determined by the economy itself


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Instead, these tech titans use a variety of accounting tricks—such as creating “sock-puppet subsidiaries” to shift profits to low-tax locations outside the United States—to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.34 The issue of corporate tax evasion is not a new problem. Since the mid-1990s, multinationals based in the United States have increasingly shifted profits to offshore tax havens. Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, says American multinationals hide 63 percent of the profits they claim to earn overseas in a handful of tax havens such as Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands.35 But Silicon Valley firms are masterful avoiders of the tax man. Facebook made over a billion dollars in profits in 2012, the year of its IPO (initial public offering), yet used an accounting trick to avoid paying even one cent in US taxes.

The loophole has been closed, but Amazon still managed to pay no federal tax in 2017 or 2018 on billions in profits.36 Apple was handed a huge tax bill from the European Union, charging the Cupertino-based company with underpaying taxes in Ireland to the tune of $15.4 billion. It eventually paid the bill, but not before moving to a new corporate home—the Channel Island of Jersey, where corporate income isn’t taxed. As of 2015, Google had “permanently reinvested” nearly $60 billion in profits in foreign tax havens, paying nothing on these profits to the US government. Tax avoidance, discrimination, and oppressive working conditions are features that call into question the growing power of the tech titans to shape life in our emergent smartphone society. But these fairly straightforward misdeeds are just a piece of the problem.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

AgriLand is registered in Luxembourg, while its management is in London. Its land buying is done through EmVest, a Pretoria-based joint venture with Grainvest, a subsidiary of the Russell Stone Group, a South African company that combines agricultural investment with selling financial services. It banks in Mauritius, a tax haven. The fund’s publicity promises that it is “breaking new ground in Africa” and bringing development. “Local smallholders benefit because we hire and train them in new methods of farming,” Payne says. “Some will want to transfer those methods to their own plots.” Well, maybe in theory. But most of its activity is more prosaic than the PR.

Other bad (and golden) boys tied up in the land rush include Anthony “Chocfinger” Ward, whose Armajaro Holdings spectacularly cornered the world’s cocoa futures, allowing him to pocket $40 million in two months as prices soared; Guy Hands, ex–Goldman Sachs bond trader and chairman of Terra Firma; litigious Dan Gold and his QVT Financial hedge fund; and Zambia-born former England Test cricketer and spin bowler Phil Edmonds, of whom more later. The Wall Street Journal found forty-five private equity groups wanting to spend over $2 billion in African agriculture in 2010, with London their biggest center of operations. Or rather London and the cloud of tax havens that the last vestiges of the British Empire have bequeathed to the world: the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, and Channel Islands. I continued my tour of London’s land investors in a mews side street behind the rugby stadium in Twickenham, where I met the “Togo boys.” A group of smart city slickers with nice cars and stubbly chins got lucky with the West African government of tiny Togo.

The Greenleaf website was still saying six hundred in late 2011, when there were only half as many at work, and Peters said the maximum would be four hundred because of mechanization. West Africa is popular with other British “boutique” investment firms that allow you to scratch a personal profit from a patch of African soil. In 2011, GreenWorld BVI, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands tax haven, was offering online gamblers two and a half acres of “high quality farmland” to grow rice in Sierra Leone for around $3000. The investment was “specifically designed to be both profitable as well as socially responsible . . . allowing you to invest like a major institutional investor, but at a fraction of the initial cost.”


pages: 693 words: 204,042

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail

“Killed them?” “I tweaked the list of countries it’s illegal to send funds to. You know how there’s about ten terror sponsor countries that you can’t wire money to? I added all the tax havens to that list.” “You mean like England?” “All of them.” “So how’s the world economy supposed to work? Money can’t move if it can’t move to tax havens.” “It shouldn’t be that way. There shouldn’t be tax havens.” Mutt throws up his hands. “What else did you do? If I may ask.” “I pikettied the U.S. tax code.” “Meaning?” “Sharp progressive tax on capital assets. All capital assets in the United States, taxed at a progressive rate that goes to ninety percent of any holdings over one hundred million.”

If someone had a tap in, if there were taps all over, no one would be able to know. Some bank accounts in a tax haven would grow and no one would be the wiser.” “Why did you do it, then?” “To alert the SEC as to what can happen. Maybe also give them the funding to be able to deal with some of this shit. Hire some people away from the hedge funds, put some muscle into the laws. Create a fucking sheriff, for God’s sake!” “So you did want them to notice.” “I guess so. Yeah, I did. The SEC I did. I did all sorts of stuff. That might not even be what got noticed.” “No? What else did you do?” “I killed all those tax havens.” Mutt stares at him. “Killed them?” “I tweaked the list of countries it’s illegal to send funds to.

Encouraged by this victory of state over finance, Congress became a little giddy and in short order passed a so-called Piketty tax, a progressive tax levied not just on incomes but on capital assets. Asset tax levels ranged from zero for assets less than ten million dollars to twenty percent on assets of one billion or more. To prevent capital from fleeing to tax havens, a capital flight penalty was also made law, with a top rate set at the famous Eisenhower-era ninety-one percent. Capital flight stopped, the law held, and nation-states everywhere felt even more empowered. Among the changes they quickly enacted at the WTO were tight currency controls, increased labor support, and environmental protections.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

States compete among themselves for rich residents by shielding their wealth.10 And although they work hard to reduce their taxes, the 1 percent of the 1 percent also do not hesitate to avoid taxes altogether if they can. Gabriel Zucman estimated that 8 percent of household financial wealth was in tax havens in 2014. This is almost eight trillion dollars, which is a lot of money to be hidden away from tax collectors. The exposure of a Panama bank that arranged for money to be hidden—a controversy that has come to be called the Panama Papers—has revealed some of the details of how all this tax reduction takes place. And the effective tax on U.S. businesses is falling fast as profit is hidden in tax havens. The hidden wealth of American corporations has lowered the effective corporate profit rate to half its nominal rate.11 Turning to the last row of table 7.1, the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the population consists of about three hundred people.

Presidential Address to the American Finance Association, January. Also available as NBER Working Paper No. 20894, January. Zucman, Gabriel. 2014. “Taxing across Borders: Tracking Personal Wealth and Corporate Profits.’” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (4) (Fall): 121–148. Zucman, Gabriel. 2015. The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Index Abbott decisions, 124 Abolitionists, 51, 54, 58 Abortion, 57–58, 72 Acosta, John, 172n14 Adelson, Sheldon, 85, 92 Advertising, 44, 59, 68, 70, 72, 83, 108–109 Affordable Care Act, xv, 18, 57, 91–92, 95, 141–142 African Americans as abominable, 51 Brown v.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

The fact that some of the most shareholder-friendly jurisdictions were used to incorporate dozens of entities that belonged to the same group suggests that using entity shielding is a highly lucrative strategy for shareholders— quite apart from the quality of the corporate law. The choice of the Cayman Islands for thirty-two of Lehman’s subsidiaries is more straightforward, for it is a well-known tax haven.53 choosing one’s taX rate Most ordinary people cannot choose their own tax rate; they may move their holdings to foreign bank accounts, but they have to fear that even the toughest bank secrecy laws will be cracked and that they will be prosecuted for tax evasion. Corporations have a much easier task in choosing the tax rate they wish to pay.

The inflow of foreign investments to Ireland has indeed boosted the country’s GDP figures; however, this has not translated into substantial gains for its citizens, as most of the profits quickly left the country again.57 Apple is only one of many examples, and Ireland is not the most egregious competitor for global business in exchange for a benign tax environment. Taking a closer look at this tax shelter, however, has shown that choosing one’s corporate law is key for tax-sheltering c Lo n i n g Lega L P e r so n s 73 schemes to work. OECD member states have vowed to crack down on tax havens and have blacklisted countries that offer rates below what they deem proper, but they have not yet reconsidered their willingness to recognize any corporation created anywhere, even if it maintains no operations and has no employees there, and its only purpose is to engage in tax arbitrage.58 regULatorY arBitrage Within hours after LBHI had filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, its major UK-based subsidiary, Lehman Brothers International Europe (LBIE), went into administration under UK law.

This daisy chain of trusts, corporate entities, and the assets they issued gave us not only CDOs, but also their “squared” and “cubed” versions. To see how this works, let’s take a look at the Kleros clones. Kleros Real Estate CDO III Ltd. was established in 2006 as a limited liability company in the Cayman Islands (hereinafter “Kleros-C”), a well-known tax haven. Moreover, the country’s laws shield companies registered there from judgments disgruntled investors might obtain in other jurisdictions; it simply does not recognize or enforce judgments obtained abroad. The only shareholder Kleros-C had was Kleros Real Estate CDO III Common Holdings, LLC (or “Kleros-D”), a limited liability company that was incorporated in Delaware (United States).


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

The merchants of the status quo have granted the European Parliament some more powers, but not sovereignty. The largest caucus in the Parliament used this to elect the Luxembourger, Jean-Claude Junker, as the new president. A politician who authorized the tiny duchy to launder money and made it a tax haven for the rich was a symbolic choice. It was to be business as usual. Who is going to snip the umbilical cord? The extreme right or new forces on the left? This remains the great unanswered question. The future of many EU countries, and indeed the the European Union itself (as constituted at present) will depend on the course taken by the crisis in the years ahead. _______________ 1 Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London and New York, 2009), p. 13. 2 Online at www.euromemorandum.eu. 4 Natopolis On 5 September 2014, in Newport, Wales, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization held an emergency conclave.

The relative autonomy they enjoy – with less restraints than the NSA – is extremely useful for the latter, which treats GCHQ as a valued surrogate. Similarly, till 2008, British politicians liked to boast that the local ‘light-touch regulation’ put the City of London well ahead of Wall Street, as Britain’s current standing as a virtual tax haven still does, approaching Luxembourg levels if not yet those of the Cayman islands. Given this reality, the right-wing obsession with the European Union seems a bit misplaced. It’s with Washington (not Brussels) that London has long been stuck in the dog-like coital lock sometimes described as a ‘special relationship’.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This was taken to extremes in the US, where the fiscal system is now riddled with concessions and exemptions won through lobbying and special pleading. The result everywhere is a high degree of complexity and the growth of tax bureaucracies, along with a new form of tax revolt whereby armies of lawyers and accountants exploit avoidance opportunities, often via off-shore tax havens, on behalf of their clients. Their guiding philosophy is the dictum of the British judge Lord Clyde, who said: No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest shovel into his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer’s pocket.

Hence his case for far higher marginal tax rates on high incomes and a progressive global wealth tax.199 If policymakers found his arguments persuasive, that would imply a return to the level of taxation reached in Western democracies in the 1970s – the high water mark in terms of redistribution. Since then, globalisation, the growth of competition between different tax jurisdictions and of tax havens, has restrained the power of governments to tax. Yet reformers such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan largely failed in their efforts to shrink the size of the state. And, paradoxically, we now have more taxation without representation on a voluntary basis, because declining turnouts in elections in the US and Europe mean that a growing proportion of the electorate pays taxes but does not vote.

Chilton 1 railway mania (Britain 1840s) 1 Rajan, Raghuram 1, 2, 3, 4 Rand, Ayn 1, 2 Raphael 1 Reading, Brian 1, 2, 3, 4 Reagan, Ronald 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Reformation 1, 2 regulators 1 regulatory arbitrage 1 Renaissance 1, 2, 3 Republic (Plato) 1, 2 retail banking 1 Reynolds, Joshua 1, 2 Ricardo, David 1 Richelieu, Cardinal 1 Ring of the Nibelung (Wagner) 1, 2, 3 Ritblat, John 1 Roaring Twenties 1, 2 robber barons 1, 2, 3 Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe) 1 Rockefeller, John D. 1, 2 rogue traders 1 Rolls-Royce 1 Roman republic 1 Roosevelt, Franklin 1 Rosenberg, Harold 1 Roseveare, Henry 1 Roubini, Nouriel 1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 2 de Rouvroy, Claude-Henri 1 Royal Exchange (London) 1 Rubens, Peter Paul 1, 2 rural exodus 1 Ruskin, John 1, 2, 3 Saatchi, Maurice 1, 2 Samuelson, Paul 1 Sandel, Michael 1 sarakin banks (Japan) 1 Sarkozy, Nicolas 1 Sassoon, Donald 1 Satyricon (Petronius) 1 Savage, Richard 1, 2 Schama, Simon 1, 2 Schiller, Friedrich 1 Scholes, Myron 1 Schopenhauer 1 Schuman, Robert 1 Schumpeter, Joseph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Schwed, Fred 1, 2 second industrial revolution (1920s) 1 Sen, Amartya 1 separation of powers 1 Shakespeare 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 shareholder activists 1 shareholder value 1 shareholders 1 Shaw, George Bernard 1 Sherman Antitrust Act (US 1890) 1 Shiller, Robert 1, 2, 3, 4 Shleifer, Andrei 1 short selling 1, 2 Siemens 1 von Siemens, Werner 1 Sinclair, Upton 1 Skidelsky, Robert 1, 2 Smith, Adam 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Smith, Sidney 1 Smithers, Andrew 1, 2 Smollett, Tobias 1 social democratic model 1, 2 Société Générale 1 Socrates 1 Solon 1 Sombart, Werner 1, 2 Soros, George 1, 2 Sotheby’s 1 South Sea Bubble 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sovereign debt 1 sovereign debt crisis (2009) 1 Spain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 speculation 1 Spenser, Edmund 1 Stabilising an Unstable Economy (Hyman Minsky) 1 Steed, Wickham 1 Stephenson, George 1 Stevens, Wallace 1 Streeck, Wolfgang 1 subprime mortgages 1, 2, 3, 4 Sutter, John 1 Sutton, Willie 1 swarf 1 Sweden 1 Swift, Jonathan 1, 2, 3 Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) 1 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 1, 2 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 1 Taoism 1 tax farming 1 tax havens 1 tax revolts 1 taxation 1 Taylor, John 1 Tea Party movement 1 Tennyson, Alfred 1 Thaler, Richard 1 Thatcher, Margaret 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Adam Smith) 1 ‘thingism’ 1 Thomas Aquinas 1, 2 Thompson, E. P. 1 Times/Sotheby Art Indices 1 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) 1 Titian 1 toads (see Madame Nui’s toad) Tocqueville, Alexis de 1 ‘too big/interconnected to fail’ syndrome 1 Toyoda, Sakichi 1 transmutation of base metal into gold 1 Trichet, Jean-Claude 1 trickledown theory 1, 2 Trollope, Anthony 1, 2, 3 tulip mania 1, 2, 3 Turner, Adair 1 two-tier capital structures 1 UBS 1 UK debt 1 entrepreneurs 1, 2 financial services 1 gold standard 1, 2 inequality 1, 2, 3 manufacturing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 regulation 1, 2 speculation 1 taxation 1 Unto This Last (John Ruskin) 1 US 1 banks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bretton Woods Conference 1 debt 1, 2, 3, 4 dependence on China 1, 2 financial services 1 gold standard 1 inequality 1, 2, 3 literature 1 manufacturing 1, 2, 3 regulation 1 robber barons 1 speculation 1, 2, 3 taxation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 trade 1 usury laws 1, 2 Utopia (Thomas More) 1, 2 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 1 Vasari 1 Vayanos, Dimitri 1 Veblen goods 1 Venttsel, Elena 1 Vermeer, Jan 1 Vickers Commission (UK) 1 Vico, Gianbattista 1 Victoria, UK Queen 1 Vinik, Jeffrey 1 Volcker, Paul 1, 2, 3 Volcker rule 1 Voltaire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Wagner, Richard 1, 2, 3 Wall Street (film) 1 Wall Street Crash (see crash of 1929) war 1 Warhol, Andy 1, 2, 3, 4 Watt, James 1 Way We Live Now, The (Anthony Trollope) 1, 2 Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) 1, 2, 3 Webb, Beatrice 1 Weber, Max 1 Wedgwood, Josiah 1 Weinstock, Arnold 1 Westinghouse, George 1 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey 1 Wheen, Francis 1 White, Harry Dexter 1 Whitney, Richard 1, 2, 3 Wilde, Oscar 1 Wilson, A.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Given the massive returns generated by their success, shouldn’t entrepreneurs then return some of the rewards to the government, so it can continue taking the big risks that can later be turned into market game-changers? One could indeed hold that the reward is created in new tax revenues. Yet, globalization and information technology have enabled profits to migrate to low tax regions or even within tax havens. It is clear that innovation is needed in the tax system to ensure that high-risk public spending can continue to guarantee future private innovation. Mazzucato’s analysis provides a framework for thinking about ways to reform the current model to achieve that. The other direction for public sector innovation relates to ‘green’ technology.

These facts simply reinforce that the tax system is not one that can be relied on for recouping investments in risky innovation, in this case by the state of California.4 The corporate tax-shuffling scheme outlined above is not used by Apple for just domestic tax purposes. In fact, Duhigg and Kocieniewski (2012) note that Apple adopts a similar approach in the global sphere by setting up various subsidiaries in corporate tax havens such as Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands and the British Virgin Islands in order to shuffle profits around and benefit from low-tax advantages. US tax code allows American companies to assign their product or service intellectual property (IP) rights to their foreign subsidiaries, which also allows companies to reduce their tax liabilities at a significant rate.

In the case of Apple, as Duhigg and Kocieniewski explain, the company’s Irish subsidiaries reportedly own the IP rights of many products and receive royalty payments from Apple’s product sales. Ownership of those Irish subsidiaries is also shared with another Apple subsidiary (Baldwin Holdings Unlimited) in another tax haven location, the British Virgin Islands. It is difficult to calculate the exact figures regarding how much Apple has managed to save through this global tax-shuffling scheme. Sullivan (2012, 777) argues that if Apple were to report half of its profit in the US as opposed to only 30 per cent, the company’s tax liability in 2011 would have been $2.4 billion higher than it actually was.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

The ‘Barnett formula’ which tries to guarantee spending levels should be replaced by an incentive formula based on the real level of income inequality (i.e. after adjusting for the cost of living) between the regions so that weaker regions would have lower taxes on both personal and corporate incomes. This will turn the economically weaker parts of the UK into tax havens. It is pretty obvious that this is likely to help rebalance the UK economy – indeed it could do so remarkably quickly. Moreover, since the policy is likely to lead to better utilisation of resources, it is likely to lead to faster economic growth overall and to permit both tax reductions and ultimately better public services as well for the whole country.

In that way, parts of the UK like Scotland, where the local elite have been traditionally hostile to returners, might be named and shamed when it can be seen how much this cliquishness is costing the local economy. These are radical proposals, particularly the proposal to replace heavy public spending outside London by turning these regions into tax havens. But my forty years of experience as a professional economist make me believe that they would be by far the best ways to reduce the degree of inequality throughout the UK and help revive the UK regions. If politicians are serious about wanting to reduce the huge scale of inequality between regions in the UK, I challenge them to take on the vested interests and implement these proposals.


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Between 2017 and 2018, more than a hundred countries agreed to exchange bank information, in many cases automatically. It must be admitted, however, that this development, positive though it undoubtedly is, is still far from doing all that needs to be done, largely because it approaches the matter in an overly sectorial way that fails to pay sufficient attention to its larger political aspects. Unless tax havens can be threatened with commercial and financial reprisals in the event that they do not supply the required information, how will it be possible to bring pressure on governments that often can count on support from one or more of the major powers? So long as sanctions are not commensurate with the gains realized through fraud, the chances of real and lasting change are extremely small.

“Inequality in Asia and the Pacific in the Era of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, May 7, 2018, https://www.unescap.org/publications/inequality-asia-and-pacific-era-2030-agenda-sustainable-development. 11. Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 12. Ibid. 13. See, for example, Jennifer Hillman, “Changing Climate for Carbon Taxes: Who’s Afraid of the WTO?” (Climate and Energy Paper Series 2013, German Marshall Fund of the United States), https://www.scribd.com/document/155956625/Changing-Climate-for-Carbon-Taxes-Who-s-Afraid-of-the-WTO. 14.


pages: 363 words: 98,496

Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell, Kit Chellel

big-box store, coronavirus, COVID-19, drone strike, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, eurozone crisis, failed state, Filipino sailors, financial innovation, information security, lockdown, megacity, offshore financial centre, Skype, South China Sea, trade route, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Along with larger tankers, such ships catalyzed explosive growth: in 2019, the total volume of goods loaded onto ships worldwide, oil included, exceeded 11 billion metric tons, more than four times the figure in 1970. The Brillante Virtuoso was owned by a company called Suez Fortune Investments, which was domiciled in the Pacific tax haven of the Marshall Islands. In June 2011, about five months after Marquez joined the crew, the Brillante was hired by a Cypriot logistics firm to pick up just over 141,000 metric tons of fuel oil from Kerch, a faded industrial port on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Worth nearly $100 million, the cargo needed to be delivered to consumers in eastern China, two oceans away.

“TO ALL: BRILLIANTE VIRTUOSO, flag Liberian, owner Marshall Islands, crew 26 all Filipino,” he wrote in a Mercury message at 3:55 a.m. That one transmission encapsulated a set of challenges typical of the fragmented nature of modern shipping. The tanker was owned by a corporate entity in a Pacific tax haven—the Marshall Islands—which was in turn owned by a Greek family based in Piraeus, just outside Athens. It sailed under the flag of tiny Liberia, which augments its finances by selling cheap, hassle-free registrations to about one in ten of the world’s commercial vessels. Not that its regulators actually resided in that impoverished West African nation; by historical quirk, the Liberian registry was run by Israeli-American entrepreneurs operating out of a headquarters in Dulles, Virginia.

As with their other innovations, this one was quickly adopted by the rest of the Piraeus shipping fraternity. By 1959, over half the “Liberian” merchant fleet was owned by Greeks, who also piled into the Panamanian registry. Other financial sleights of hand pioneered by Onassis in particular, like dividing the ownership and management of ships into separate companies domiciled in tax havens, became similarly commonplace. Once he had proved the concept, the basic appeal of such regulatory dodges was too attractive to resist: all of the profits, little of the accountability. * * * — Veale and Conner hadn’t found it easy to compile a substantive dossier on how Marios Iliopoulos came to be among Piraeus’s shipping tycoons.


pages: 234 words: 53,078

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

The EITC is a tax credit for low-income wage-earners that dates back to the Nixon administration. It was 3 During the Clinton administration, the United States worked with other wealthy countries to develop a treaty to crack down on international tax havens. The Bush administration backed away from this international effort in its first six months in office. “A Retreat on Tax Havens,” New York Times, May 26, 2001. 4 See also the discussion of tax loopholes and mechanisms for improving enforcement in Sawicky (2006). 85 intended to offset the payroll tax that these workers pay for Social Security and Medicare.


pages: 205 words: 55,435

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing by Niels Jensen

Alan Greenspan, Basel III, Bear Stearns, declining real wages, deglobalization, disruptive innovation, diversification, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, fixed income, full employment, Greenspan put, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, inflation targeting, job automation, John Nash: game theory, liquidity trap, low interest rates, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, passive investing, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, South China Sea, total factor productivity, working-age population, zero-sum game

Think of it instead as helicopter money delivered through fiscal means and designed to increase the spending power of the poorest two-thirds of income earners. One way this could be achieved will be revealed in chapter 10; however, before you object to spending public money on non-productivity-enhancing initiatives like helicopter money, think about the trillions of dollars that companies from all over the world have stashed away in offshore tax havens. Taxing that money at a reasonable rate could easily finance such a policy, and pushing out the D-curve would benefit the corporate sector anyway. What else could we do? Some will argue that de-globalisation could also do the trick, but I won’t even go there. Such a move would be a very unfortunate step back into the dark ages and would totally disregard the contribution that rising international trade has made to economic growth over the past few decades.

Technically speaking, it is helicopter money, but it is helicopter money through fiscal means, and it will most definitely push the D-curve out without turning the country into another Zimbabwe. Further up the food chain, you simply introduce an annual tax rebate for 2–3 years and monitor how that affects consumer spending. If it works, you let it run for as long as necessary, and you finance it by taxing multi-national companies’ untaxed profits in offshore tax havens. * * * 94 The National Health Service in the UK does not always inform you about the more expensive treatment forms. I have experienced this myself. 95 Source: Daniel Amerman (2017). 96 As I have pointed out earlier in the book, the workforce will shrink in many, but not in all, European countries. 97 As I have mentioned earlier, in recent years, US GDP has only grown by about $0.20 for every dollar of additional debt. 98 Source: United Nations (2015). 12.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

He filled his French homes with art deco furniture, and paintings paid for from Swiss bank accounts, and set to work updating the swimming pools, installing designer kitchens, and fitting acres of marble in the corridors and bathrooms. He joined the Ritz Club and developed a passion for the French Riviera. That whole coastline became his playground. He found the aristocratic charms of Nice much to his taste, and decided to buy property there too, before changing his mind and opting to rent in the tax haven of Monaco instead. He fell in love with boats, grand sailing yachts with helipads and pools, and would motor down to Cannes to see what was for sale. He moored his new purchases at the pretty resort of Golfe Juan. There was a twin-engine speedboat built in Miami, and an ocean-going yacht with four suites and a VIP stateroom.

The other five dozen or so accounts were held by family members and officials (usually one and the same) and by two entertainment companies based in California and owned by Obiang’s playboy son, Teodoro. Riggs Bank helped the Obiang family establish offshore shell corporations for the president and his sons. It also facilitated wire transfers totalling more than $35 million from Obiang’s ‘oil account’ to two companies with accounts in tax havens. Obiang had found a bank right at the heart of the American establishment willing to handle his corrupt finances without asking difficult questions, a bank which must have suspected money laundering and misappropriation of funds but didn’t seem to care. In May 2001, top officials from Riggs Bank wrote to Obiang thanking him ‘for the opportunity you granted to us in hosting a luncheon in your honour here at Riggs Bank’.

Houphouet-Boigny became the country’s biggest exporter of cocoa, and quickly expanded his business into pineapples and avocados. He could see no conflict of interest with his role as president, and took to announcing publicly just how rich he had become. His money, he said, accounted for a quarter of all deposits in Abidjan’s main bank. He had more in tax havens abroad. ‘Is there any serious man in the world who does not place a portion of his assets in Switzerland?’ he smilingly asked during one interview.7 These were the glory days. Houphouet-Boigny travelled Europe collecting trophy homes, several in France, one in Geneva, and a castle in Italy close to the summer residence of the pope.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

Chandra, a disgraced researcher whose papers have been discredited and retracted, who has been the subject of major articles on research fraud, including one by Dr Richard Smith in the British Medical Journal called ‘Investigating the previous studies of a fraudulent author’. There is an entire three-part investigative documentary series on his worrying career made by Canada’s CBC (you can watch it online), and at the conclusion of it he was, to all intents and purposes, in hiding in India. He has 120 different bank accounts in various tax havens, and he did, of course, patent his own multivitamin mixture, which he sells as an ‘evidence-based’ nutrition supplement for the elderly. The ‘evidence’ is largely derived from his own clinical trials. In the name of scrupulous fairness, I am happy to clarify that much of this has come out since the first edition of Holford’s book; but there had been serious questions about Chandra’s research for some time, and nutrition academics were wary about citing it, simply because his findings seemed to be so incredibly positive.

Chandra, a disgraced researcher whose papers have been discredited and retracted, who has been the subject of major articles on research fraud, including one by Dr Richard Smith in the British Medical Journal called ‘Investigating the previous studies of a fraudulent author’. There is an entire three-part investigative documentary series on his worrying career made by Canada’s CBC (you can watch it online), and at the conclusion of it he was, to all intents and purposes, in hiding in India. He has 120 different bank accounts in various tax havens, and he did, of course, patent his own multivitamin mixture, which he sells as an ‘evidence-based’ nutrition supplement for the elderly. The ‘evidence’ is largely derived from his own clinical trials. In the name of scrupulous fairness, I am happy to clarify that much of this has come out since the first edition of Holford’s book; but there had been serious questions about Chandra’s research for some time, and nutrition academics were wary about citing it, simply because his findings seemed to be so incredibly positive.

Chandra, a disgraced researcher whose papers have been discredited and retracted, who has been the subject of major articles on research fraud, including one by Dr Richard Smith in the British Medical Journal called ‘Investigating the previous studies of a fraudulent author’. There is an entire three-part investigative documentary series on his worrying career made by Canada’s CBC (you can watch it online), and at the conclusion of it he was, to all intents and purposes, in hiding in India. He has 120 different bank accounts in various tax havens, and he did, of course, patent his own multivitamin mixture, which he sells as an ‘evidence-based’ nutrition supplement for the elderly. The ‘evidence’ is largely derived from his own clinical trials. In the name of scrupulous fairness, I am happy to clarify that much of this has come out since the first edition of Holford’s book; but there had been serious questions about Chandra’s research for some time, and nutrition academics were wary about citing it, simply because his findings seemed to be so incredibly positive.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Leucht and Marquis (2013) study the exchange of ideas between the US and Europe, and Leucht (2009) explores how the traditionally protectionist economies of Western Europe agreed on common competition rules. j  Zucman, Tørsløv, and Wier (2018) find that 40 percent of multinational profits are shifted to tax havens, and the main winners are such countries as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Singapore. The main losers are EU countries (20 percent of profits shifted) and the US (15 percent of profits shifted). k  The EU can directly prohibit certain domestic regulations, such as prohibition of golden shares and price controls in transportation industries.

In recent years, the main issue has been corporate tax evasion, which is legal for the most part but costly and inefficient nonetheless. According to research by Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, the US loses around $70 billion in tax revenue each year because corporations shift their profits to tax havens.a That is almost one-fifth of all corporate tax revenue. As Zucman explains, almost two-thirds of “all the profits made outside of the United States by American multinationals are now reported in six low- or zero-tax countries: the Netherlands, Bermuda, Luxembourg, Ireland, Singapore and Switzerland.”

The TCJA vindicated these efforts with a repatriation provision that taxes foreign earnings at a reduced rate of 15.5 percent, which is less than half of the rate used to provision the taxes. As a result, a large share of the taxes provisioned by Apple before 2018 will never be paid. All large companies engage in profit shifting, and most make use of tax havens to avoid paying taxes. But booking taxes that one does not expect to pay seems particularly disingenuous. To wrap up our discussion of taxes, it is important to emphasize that corporate tax evasion represents a clear failure of public policy. Corporate tax evasion is mostly legal and could be reduced or even eliminated with a minimum of political willpower.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

“Firms like this can use financial engineering to play all sorts of games,” says Stiglitz, who favors a global flat tax on such firms to avoid a zero-sum race to the bottom to the lowest-cost tax havens.9 How would this actually work in practice? A key idea found in many of the proposals from tax reform advocates is to tax revenues at the point of sale, rather than profits, which would reduce the sort of financial engineering that allows IP- and data-rich companies like Apple and Google to offshore profits in tax havens like Ireland and the Netherlands. The problem was first raised at the global level by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2012, via its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative; it’s now under discussion in forums like the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

And companies large and small would have equal access to the gold mine; this would address one of the most frequent complaints I hear from data-driven start-ups in the United States, which is that the biggest players have walled off access to crucial data. A Fair System of Tax for the Digital Age Tech, like finance, has hugely benefited from those intangible riches like data and information that can be so easily moved to the tax haven du jour, for the very reason that they are intangible—these assets are virtual rather than physical (like factories or machinery or brick-and-mortar stores) and so can be located anywhere. But the revelations of the Panama Papers, which uncovered how rich companies and individuals around the world were offshoring vast sums of money,8 have helped to galvanize public debate around how to create a fairer system of tax for the information age, and the United Kingdom, France, India, and others are now suggesting fundamental shifts in the nature of corporate taxation in an effort to level the playing field.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

But, says Lakoff, progressives too often try to set out their own views on tax with lengthy explanations, precisely because no concise alternative frame has been developed.40 They desperately need an alternative two-word phrase to encapsulate their view and counter the other. In fact the frame of ‘tax justice’ – which instantly invokes community, fairness and accountability – has been fast gaining traction internationally as global scandals over tax havens and corporate tax avoidance have hit the headlines. Having a powerful way to frame the matter has no doubt helped to channel public outrage and mobilise widespread demand for change.41 Just as Lakoff’s work has revealed the power of verbal framing in political and economic debate, this book aims to reveal the power of visual framing, and to use it to transform twenty-first-century economic thinking.

There are now more than 2,000 billionaires living in 20 countries from the USA, China and Russia to Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia.93 An annual wealth tax levied at just 1.5% of their net worth would raise $74 billion each year: that alone would be enough to fill the funding gap to get every child into school and deliver essential health services in all low-income countries.94 Match that with a global corporate tax system that treats multinational corporations as single, unified firms, and closes tax loopholes and tax havens, so boosting public revenue for public purposes worldwide.95 Supplement these with taxes on destabilising and damaging industries, such as a global financial transactions tax to curb speculative trading, and a global carbon tax levied on all oil, coal and gas production. Yes, some of these tax proposals sound unfeasible now, but so many once-unfeasible ideas – abolishing slavery, gaining the vote for women, ending apartheid, securing gay rights – turn out to be inevitable.

Public investment, on the other hand, focuses on the public goods – such as high-quality schools and effective public transport – that underpin collective well-being.57 Second, end the extraordinary injustice of tax loopholes, offshore havens, profit shifting, and special exemptions that allow many of the world’s richest people and largest corporations – from Amazon to Zara – to pay negligible tax in the countries in which they live and do business. At least $18.5 trillion is hidden by wealthy individuals in tax havens worldwide, representing an annual loss of more than $156 billion in tax revenue, a sum that could end extreme income poverty twice over.58 At the same time, transnational corporations shift around $660 billion of their profits each year to near-zero tax jurisdictions such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda and Luxembourg.59 The Global Alliance for Tax Justice is among those focused on tackling this, campaigning worldwide for greater corporate transparency and accountability, fair international tax rules, and progressive national tax systems.60 Third, shifting both personal and corporate taxation away from taxing income streams and towards taxing accumulated wealth – such as real estate and financial assets – will diminish the role played by a growing GDP in ensuring sufficient tax revenue.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Information bias and cooking the books is not a recent phenomenon and the Enron scandal is just one example of this practice. The 2014 investigative documentary, The Price We Pay, by Harold Crooks, shows how companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon (among many others) shift profits to offshore tax residencies and tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands, beyond the reach of regulators and tax authorities. By undertaking such practices, managers are able to provide an alternative picture of their company’s obligations and liabilities, leading to substantial medium-term cash flow competitive advantage (Cilloni and Marinoni, 2015).

Studies done by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS ) , show that business owners and corporations report less than their income to evade taxes. As of 2015, one study found that this led to a tax gap (difference between taxes paid and taxes due) of $500 billion in federal taxes in 2015 alone (Rogoff, 2016). A part of this sum is related to the cash that is stored in tax havens (refer to Harold Crooks), but this amounts to around 20% of the total sum (Zucman, 2015). Over 50% of the outstanding amount is related to cash-intensive activities (Rogoff, 2016). In other countries, a similar occurrence is seen. Although the figures may not be the same, the fact that EU countries have stricter tax laws means that the percentage value in comparison to GDP is much more significant.

Digital Currencies, Decentralized Ledgers, and the Future of Central Banking . NBER Working Paper No. 22238. Zarlenga, S. A. (2002). The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money, The Story of Power. American Monetary Institute. Zucman, G. (2015). The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens . University of Chicago Press. Chapter 4 Argia M. Sbordone, A. T. (2010). Policy Analysis Using DSGE Models: An Introduction . Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Arthur, W. B. (1994). Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality: The El Farol Problem. The American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, 406-411.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

The United States, for instance, claims the right to tax citizens with foreign earnings of more than $97,600 a year no matter where they move, unless they go through the onerous process of renouncing their citizenship and paying an exit tax which was raised 422 percent in 2014. This provoked an uproar, which preceded another 422 percent raise in 2015. American citizens can’t escape taxes whether they move to a seastead or Sweden. Besides, the market for tax havens is well served by existing countries. The microstate of Andorra is a tax haven with no military, surrounded entirely by the great nations of Europe, and it is doing quite well for itself. If you want an island tax haven, the Bahamas will do. Seasteads will prosper by trying something new, not by competing with existing island paradises. Q: Won’t the oceans become crowded with seasteads? People already live on more than a hundred thousand natural islands.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

These operators were attracted by stable cash flows, part of which came from local authorities, and opportunities for financial engineering: cheap debt; property which could be sold and leased back; tax breaks on debt interest payments and carried interest; and - ultimately - frail and vulnerable residents whom the state would have to look after if the business failed. The corporate structures of some care home owners became exceedingly complex and often hidden in tax havens, while corporation tax payments were low or nil. Given that local authorities still funded many care home placements and that the nurses employed in the homes had been state-trained, opaque corporate structures and minimal tax payments are hardly the way to provide an essential public service. Four Seasons Health Care displays many of these characteristics.

, Centre for Economic Performance Special Paper 31 (2013), compared to 65-70 per cent during similar periods at the end of the 1960s and during the 1980s. 47. Source: author's elaboration from: piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c 48. https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp2 economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-summ-en_0.pdf 49. Source: author's elaboration on OECD data. 50. See A. Greenspan and J. Kennedy, Estimates of Home Mortgage Originations, Repayments, and Debt on One-to-Four-Family Residences, Finance and Economic Discussion Series 2005-41 (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2005).

., Industrial Policy in Europe Since the Second World War: What Has Been Learnt? ECIPE Occasional Paper no. 1, 2012 (Brussels: The European Centre for International Political Economy): http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/41902/ Oxfam, An Economy for the 1%, Oxfam Briefing Paper, January 2016: https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp21 economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-en_0.pdf Oxfam, An Economy for the 99%, Oxfam Briefing Paper, January 2017: https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp- economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf Palin, A., ‘Chart that tells a story - UK share ownership', Financial Times, 4 September 2015: https://www.ft.com/content/14cda94c-5163-11e5-b029-b9d50a74fd14 Perez, C., ‘Capitalism, technology and a green global golden age: The role of history in helping to shape the future', in Jacobs, M. and Mazzucato, M.


pages: 257 words: 71,686

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Emanuel Derman, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flash crash, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, inventory management, job-hopping, Large Hadron Collider, light touch regulation, London Whale, Money creation, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, regulatory arbitrage, Satyajit Das, selection bias, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, too big to fail

In turn, AIG trusted the credit rating agencies’ triple-A ratings. As time went on, the products became more and more intricate and ‘exotic’ but the triple-A ratings kept coming. Meanwhile, the banks kept some of these complex products on their own balance sheets – often hidden in deliberately complicated ‘vehicles’ in offshore tax havens. The accountants either failed to see any of this, or thought it was fine, or looked the other way, as did regulators and politicians. In 2007, the Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, praised a gathering of bankers and asset managers in a speech at Mansion House: ‘The financial services sector in Britain, and the City of London at the centre of it, is a great example of a highly skilled, high value-added, talent-driven industry that shows how we can excel in a world of global competition.

Investors had to take big losses but banks, too, had kept some of these products. They had to write off huge sums of money as well – but how much? Not only had many of the products themselves become mind-bogglingly difficult to value or understand but the same was also true of the ‘vehicles’ in offshore tax havens where the banks had placed many of them. Would the banks’ buffers be big enough? At Lehman Brothers they were not, and when this bank had to announce bankruptcy other banks and financial institutions stopped lending each other money. Suddenly the financial world was gripped by a paralysing fear: what would happen tomorrow?


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

Armies of accountants are a staple of capitalism; the manufacture of new deductions is one of our country’s greatest showcases of innovation. But the tech companies are especially slippery with the tax man. In part, it’s the nature of their product. Unlike manufacturing or finance, tech doesn’t need to be pinned to a geographic home. Tech companies can transfer their core assets, their intellectual property, to whatever tax haven offers the sweetest deal. They have hatched schemes that their competitors—brick-and-mortar firms, media companies—couldn’t dare attempt. When Jeff Bezos first conceived of Amazon, he originally wanted to locate the company on a California Indian reservation, where it would pay hardly any tax.

Google has the same sort of unpatriotic accounting schemes. It prefers maneuvers known as the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich. Google has also shifted assets to Bermuda, that famous mecca of high tech. By the end of 2015, it had “permanently reinvested” $58.3 billion of its profits in foreign tax havens, earnings on which it pays no U.S. tax. The tech companies maintain every shred of data, yet seem to want to purge every bit of taxable earnings. The year Facebook went public, it recorded $1.1 billion in American profits, but didn’t pay a cent of federal or state income tax. Indeed, it earned a $429 million refund.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In 2008, following pressure from the United States and other G7 governments, the IMF persuaded twenty-six countries to endorse “generally accepted principles and practices” for sovereign wealth funds on timely disclosure and sound risk management and governance structures.30 But even if these principles were established in international law, there is no way to enforce them. And SWFs are hardly the only financial institutions that keep billion-dollar secrets. Hedge funds and private-equity funds zealously guard sensitive information about their operations, sometimes by domiciling in offshore tax havens. Yet hedge funds and private-equity firms aren’t owned and operated by governments, and they’re far less likely to put political considerations ahead of profits in making investment decisions. Unfortunately for advocates of openness, the largest sovereign wealth funds are found in authoritarian state-capitalist countries.

The European Commission, the closest thing Europe has to a central government, should push to complete the single market—by extending it to cover all services, by preventing backsliding on state aid and budgetary rules, by eliminating competition among member states over tax rates, and by forcing tighter regulation of tax havens to prevent capital flight. The French and German governments will eventually have to find the political courage to accept gradual (but sharp) cuts in farming subsidies, payouts that now make up nearly half the EU budget via the Common Agricultural Policy. But the European Union and its commitment to free markets are already a success story worthy of emulation.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

They were seduced by his charm, and were at that point predisposed to approve anything he wanted. It was just incredible.’ But Peter Leitner and his colleagues were fast off the mark; they knew Archibald Cox and the Sextant Group were the screen between Washington and Beijing. Through a subtle misdirection of funds into tax havens in the Caribbean, dubious Chinese businessmen had been brought into the deal. ‘One of them was the “Red Princeling” [the heir to one of the top officials of the Chinese Communist Party]. It was none other than Deng Xiaoping’s son-in-law.’ It is public knowledge that Deng Xiaoping handed the reins of the China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group Corporation (CNMC) — a formidable state-owned mining company — to his son-in-law Wu Jianchang to ensure the longevity of the strategic nonferrous metal sector.15 It was the very same Wu Jianchang who, through CNMC’s New York branch, was directly involved in the sale of Magnequench.

The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs would also have to review the 1967 treaty to ensure access to ownership if ‘New Space’ — the fledgling private space economy that has come with the emergence with US space entrepreneurs — is to take off.34 This could happen within five or six years.35 Enter other players like Luxembourg, which is already securing its position.36 In 2016, its finance minister, Etienne Schneider, announced the Asteroid Mining Plan — the first European space initiative to promote a favourable legal framework for asteroid mining. In 2019, he signed an agreement with the US to share intelligence on space. There is even the provision of €200 million in funding to incentivise space-mining companies to set up in the Grand Duchy. Evidently, the scandal-plagued tax haven is focusing on new growth by fashioning itself as the global hub of the New Space Economy so that it can attract entrepreneurs and jobs … and generate handsome tax revenues.37 We need to think very hard about the moral of this story of land, oceans, and asteroids. The more equal distribution of resources that we celebrate has, in fact, led to the biggest drive for mineral ownership the world has ever seen.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

In the years before the global financial crisis, policymakers in both Britain and the USA understood well that Britain was using looser regulation as a tool to attract business from New York to London. Locations such as the Cayman Islands may be more accommodating still. These offshore locations (‘treasure islands’14) are often described as ‘tax havens’, but they are every bit as much regulatory havens as tax havens. The Grimaldis of Monaco were the first to discover the potential profitability of such activity when they set up the Monte Carlo casino a hundred and fifty years ago, and jurisdictional arbitrage has since become a major revenue source for many small states. Regulatory arbitrage, fiscal arbitrage and accounting arbitrage all cost money.

.: Hyperion 220 Loomis, Carol 108 lotteries 65, 66, 68, 72 Lucas, Robert 40 Lynch, Dennios 108 Lynch, Peter 108, 109 M M-Pesa 186 Maastricht Treaty (1993) 243, 250 McCardie, Sir Henry 83, 84, 282, 284 McGowan, Harry 45 Machiavelli, Niccolò 224 McKinley, William 44 McKinsey 115, 126 Macy’s department store 46 Madoff, Bernard 29, 118, 131, 132, 177, 232, 293 Madoff Securities 177 Magnus, King of Sweden 196 Manhattan Island, New York: and Native American sellers 59, 63 Manne, Henry 46 manufacturing companies, rise of 45 Marconi 48 marine insurance 62, 63 mark-to-market accounting 126, 128–9, 320n22 mark-to-model approach 128–9, 320n21 Market Abuse Directive (MAD) 226 market economy 4, 281, 302, 308 ‘market for corporate control, the’ 46 market risk 97, 98, 177, 192 market-makers 25, 28, 30, 31 market-making 49, 109, 118, 136 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID) 226 Markkula, Mike 162, 166, 167 Markopolos, Harry 232 Markowitz, Harry 69 Markowitz model of portfolio allocation 68–9 Martin, Felix 323n5 martingale 130, 131, 136, 139, 190 Marx, Groucho 252 Marx, Karl 144, 145 Capital 143 Mary Poppins (film) 11, 12 MasterCard 186 Masters, Brooke 120 maturity transformation 88, 92 Maxwell, Robert 197, 201 Mayan civilisation 277 Meade, James 263 Means, Gardiner 51 Meeker, Mary 40, 167 Melamed, Leo 19 Mercedes 170 merchant banks 25, 30, 33 Meriwether, John 110, 134 Merkel, Angela 231 Merrill Lynch 135, 199, 293, 300 Merton, Robert 110 Metronet 159 Meyer, André 205 MGM 33 Microsoft 29, 167 middleman, role of the 80–87 agency and trading 82–3 analysts 86 bad intermediaries 81–2 from agency to trading 84–5 identifying goods and services required 80, 81 logistics 80, 81 services from financial intermediaries 80–81 supply chain 80, 81 transparency 84 ‘wisdom of crowds’ 86–7 Midland Bank 24 Milken, Michael 46, 292 ‘millennium bug’ 40 Miller, Bill 108, 109 Minuit, Peter 59, 63 Mises, Ludwig von 225 Mittelstand (medium-size business sector) 52, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 mobile banking apps 181 mobile phone payment transfers 186–7 Modigliani-Miller theorem 318n9 monetarism 241 monetary economics 5 monetary policy 241, 243, 245, 246 money creation 88 money market fund 120–21 Moneyball phenomenon 165 monopolies 45 Monte Carlo casino 123 Monte dei Paschi Bank of Siena 24 Montgomery Securities 167 Moody’s rating agency 21, 248, 249, 313n6 moral hazard 74, 75, 76, 92, 95, 256, 258 Morgan, J.P. 44, 166, 291 Morgan Stanley 25, 40, 130, 135, 167, 268 Morgenthau, District Attorney Robert 232–3 mortality tables 256 mortgage banks 27 mortgage market fluctuation in mortgage costs 148 mechanised assessment 84–5 mortgage-backed securities 20, 21, 40, 85, 90, 100, 128, 130, 150, 151, 152, 168, 176–7, 284 synthetic 152 Mozilo, Angelo 150, 152, 154, 293 MSCI World Bank Index 135 muckraking 44, 54–5, 79 ‘mugus’ 118, 260 multinational companies, and diversification 96–7 Munger, Charlie 127 Munich, Germany 62 Munich Re 62 Musk, Elon 168 mutual funds 27, 108, 202, 206 mutual societies 30 mutualisation 79 mutuality 124, 213 ‘My Way’ (song) 72 N Napoleon Bonaparte 26 Napster 185 NASA 276 NASDAQ 29, 108, 161 National Economic Council (US) 5, 58 National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) 255 National Institutes of Health 167 National Insurance Fund (UK) 254 National Provincial Bank 24 National Science Foundation 167 National Westminster Bank 24, 34 Nationwide 151 Native Americans 59, 63 Nazis 219, 221 neo-liberal economic policies 39, 301 Netjets 107 Netscape 40 Neue Markt 170 New Deal 225 ‘new economy’ bubble (1999) 23, 34, 40, 42, 98, 132, 167, 199, 232, 280 new issue market 112–13 New Orleans, Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina disaster (2005) 79 New Testament 76 New York Stock Exchange 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 49, 292 New York Times 283 News of the World 292, 295 Newton, Isaac 35, 132, 313n18 Niederhoffer, Victor 109 NINJAs (no income, no job, no assets) 222 Nixon, Richard 36 ‘no arbitrage’ condition 69 non-price competition 112, 219 Norman, Montagu 253 Northern Rock 89, 90–91, 92, 150, 152 Norwegian sovereign wealth fund 161, 253 Nostradamus 274 O Obama, Barack 5, 58, 77, 194, 271, 301 ‘Obamacare’ 77 Occidental Petroleum 63 Occupy movement 52, 54, 312n2 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan 305 off-balance-sheet financing 153, 158, 160, 210, 250 Office of Thrift Supervision 152–3 oil shock (1973–4) 14, 36–7, 89 Old Testament 75–6 oligarchy 269, 302–3, 305 oligopoly 118, 188 Olney, Richard 233, 237, 270 open market operations 244 options 19, 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 263 Osborne, George 328n19 ‘out of the money option’ 102, 103 Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 overseas assets and liabilities 179–80, 179 owner-managed businesses 30 ox parable xi-xii Oxford University 12 P Pacific Gas and Electric 246 Pan Am 238 Paris financial centre 26 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 295 partnerships 30, 49, 50, 234 limited liability 313n14 Partnoy, Frank 268 passive funds 99, 212 passive management 207, 209, 212 Patek Philippe 195, 196 Paulson, Hank 300 Paulson, John 64, 109, 115, 152, 191, 284 ‘payment in kind’ securities 131 payment protection policies 198 payments system 6, 7, 25, 180, 181–8, 247, 259–60, 281, 297, 306 PayPal 167, 168, 187 Pecora, Ferdinand 25 Pecora hearings (1932–34) 218 peer-to-peer lending 81 pension funds 29, 98, 175, 177, 197, 199, 200, 201, 208, 213, 254, 282, 284 pension provision 78, 253–6 pension rights 53, 178 Perkins, Charles 233 perpetual inventory method 321n4 Perrow, Charles 278, 279 personal financial management 6, 7 personal liability 296 ‘petrodollars’ 14, 37 Pfizer 96 Pierpoint Morgan, J. 165 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster (1987) 63 Ponzi, Charles 131, 132 Ponzi schemes 131, 132, 136, 201 pooled investment funds 197 portfolio insurance 38 Potts, Robin, QC 61, 63, 72, 119, 193 PPI, mis-selling of 296 Prebble, Lucy: ENRON 126 price competition 112, 219 price discovery 226 price mechanism 92 Prince, Chuck 34 private equity 27, 98, 166, 210 managers 210, 289 private insurance 76, 77 private sector 78 privatisation 39, 78, 157, 158, 258, 307 probabilistic thinking 67, 71, 79 Procter & Gamble 69, 108 product innovation 13 property and infrastructure 154–60 protectionism 13 Prudential 200 public companies, conversion to 18, 31–2, 49 public debt 252 public sector 78 Q Quandt, Herbert 170 Quandt Foundation 170 quantitative easing 245, 251 quantitative style 110–11 quants 22, 107, 110 Quattrone, Frank 167, 292–3 queuing 92 Quinn, Sean 156 R railroad regulation 237 railway mania (1840s) 35 Raines, Franklin 152 Rajan, Raghuram 56, 58, 79, 102 Rakoff, Judge Jed 233, 294, 295 Ramsey, Frank 67, 68 Rand, Ayn 79, 240 ‘random walk’ 69 Ranieri, Lew 20, 22, 106–7, 134, 152 rating agencies 21, 41, 84–5, 97, 151, 152, 153, 159, 249–50 rationality 66–7, 68 RBS see Royal Bank of Scotland re-insurance 62–3 Reagan, Ronald 18, 23, 54, 59, 240 real economy 7, 18, 57, 143, 172, 190, 213, 226, 239, 271, 280, 288, 292, 298 redundancy 73, 279 Reed, John 33–4, 48, 49, 50, 51, 242, 293, 314n40 reform 270–96 other people’s money 282–5 personal responsibility 292–6 principles of 270–75 the reform of structure 285–92 robust systems and complex structures 276–81 regulation 215, 217–39 the Basel agreements 220–25 and competition 113 the origins of financial regulation 217–19 ‘principle-based’ 224 the regulation industry 229–33 ‘rule-based’ 224 securities regulation 225–9 what went wrong 233–9 ‘Regulation Q’ (US) 13, 14, 20, 28, 120, 121 regulatory agencies 229, 230, 231, 235, 238, 274, 295, 305 regulatory arbitrage 119–24, 164, 223, 250 regulatory capture 237, 248, 262 Reich, Robert 265, 266 Reinhart, C.M. 251 relationship breakdown 74, 79 Rembrandts, genuine/fake 103, 127 Renaissance Technologies 110, 111, 191 ‘repo 105’ arbitrage 122 repo agreement 121–2 repo market 121 Reserve Bank of India 58 Reserve Primary Fund 121 Resolution Trust Corporation 150 retirement pension 78 return on equity (RoE) 136–7, 191 Revelstoke, first Lord 31 risk 6, 7, 55, 56–79 adverse selection and moral hazard 72–9 analysis by ‘ketchup economists’ 64 chasing the dream 65–72 Geithner on 57–8 investment 256 Jackson Hole symposium 56–7 Kohn on 56 laying bets on the interpretation of incomplete information 61 and Lloyd’s 62–3 the LMX spiral 62–3, 64 longevity 256 market 97, 98 mitigation 297 randomness 76 socialisation of individual risks 61 specific 97–8 risk management 67–8, 72, 79, 137, 191, 229, 233, 234, 256 risk premium 208 risk thermostat 74–5 risk weighting 222, 224 risk-pooling 258 RJR Nabisco 46, 204 ‘robber barons’ 44, 45, 51–2 Robertson, Julian 98, 109, 132 Robertson Stephens 167 Rockefeller, John D. 44, 52, 196 Rocket Internet 170 Rogers, Richard 62 Rogoff, K.S. 251 rogue traders 130, 300 Rohatyn, Felix 205 Rolls-Royce 90 Roman empire 277, 278 Rome, Treaty of (1964) 170 Rooney, Wayne 268 Roosevelt, Franklin D. v, 25, 235 Roosevelt, Theodore 43–4, 235, 323n1 Rothschild family 217 Royal Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 91, 103, 124, 129, 135, 138, 139, 211, 231, 293 Rubin, Robert 57 In an Uncertain World 67 Ruskin, John 60, 63 Unto this Last 56 Russia defaults on debts 39 oligarchies 303 Russian Revolution (1917) 3 S Saes 168 St Paul’s Churchyard, City of London 305 Salomon Bros. 20, 22, 27, 34, 110, 133–4 ‘Salomon North’ 110 Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices 217 Samuelson, Paul 208 Samwer, Oliver 170 Sarkozy, Nicolas 248, 249 Savage, L.J. 67 Scholes, Myron 19, 69, 110 Schrödinger’s cat 129 Scottish Parliament 158 Scottish Widows 26, 27, 30 Scottish Widows Fund 26, 197, 201, 212, 256 search 195, 209, 213 defined 144 and the investment bank 197 Second World War 36, 221 secondary markets 85, 170, 210 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 20, 64, 126, 152, 197, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 247, 292, 293, 294, 313n6 securities regulation 225–9 securitisation 20–21, 54, 100, 151, 153, 164, 169, 171, 222–3 securitisation boom (1980s) 200 securitised loans 98 See’s Candies 107 Segarra, Carmen 232 self-financing companies 45, 179, 195–6 sell-side analysts 199 Sequoia Capital 166 Shad, John S.R. 225, 228–9 shareholder value 4, 45, 46, 50, 211 Sharpe, William 69, 70 Shell 96 Sherman Act (1891) 44 Shiller, Robert 85 Siemens 196 Siemens, Werner von 196 Silicon Valley, California 166, 167, 168, 171, 172 Simon, Hermann 168 Simons, Jim 23, 27, 110, 111–12, 124 Sinatra, Frank 72 Sinclair, Upton 54, 79, 104, 132–3 The Jungle 44 Sing Sing maximum-security gaol, New York 292 Skilling, Jeff 126, 127, 128, 149, 197, 259 Slim, Carlos 52 Sloan, Alfred 45, 49 Sloan Foundation 49 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), financing 165–72, 291 Smith, Adam 31, 51, 60 The Wealth of Nations v, 56, 106 Smith, Greg 283 Smith Barney 34 social security 52, 79, 255 Social Security Trust Fund (US) 254, 255 socialism 4, 225, 301 Société Générale 130 ‘soft commission’ 29 ‘soft’ commodities 17 Soros, George 23, 27, 98, 109, 111–12, 124, 132 South Sea Bubble (18th century) 35, 132, 292 sovereign wealth funds 161, 253 Soviet empire 36 Soviet Union 225 collapse of 23 lack of confidence in supplies 89–90 Spain: property bubble 42 Sparks, D.L. 114, 283, 284 specific risk 97–8 speculation 93 Spitzer, Eliot 232, 292 spread 28, 94 Spread Networks 2 Square 187 Stamp Duty 274 Standard & Poor’s rating agency 21, 99, 248, 249, 313n6 Standard Life 26, 27, 30 standard of living 77 Standard Oil 44, 196, 323n1 Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) 323n1 Stanford University 167 Stanhope 158 State Street 200, 207 sterling devaluation (1967) 18 stewardship 144, 163, 195–203, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213 Stewart, Jimmy 12 Stigler, George 237 stock exchanges 17 see also individual stock exchanges stock markets change in organisation of 28 as a means of taking money out of companies 162 rise of 38 stock-picking 108 stockbrokers 16, 25, 30, 197, 198 Stoll, Clifford 227–8 stone fei (in Micronesia) 323n5 Stone, Richard 263 Stora Enso 196 strict liability 295–6 Strine, Chancellor Leo 117 structured investment vehicles (SIVs) 158, 223 sub-prime lending 34–5, 75 sub-prime mortgages 63, 75, 109, 149, 150, 169, 244 Summers, Larry 22, 55, 73, 119, 154, 299 criticism of Rajan’s views 57 ‘ketchup economics’ 5, 57, 69 support for financialisation 57 on transformation of investment banking 15 Sunday Times 143 ‘Rich List’ 156 supermarkets: financial services 27 supply chain 80, 81, 83, 89, 92 Surowiecki, James: The Wisdom of Crowds xi swap markets 21 SWIFT clearing system 184 Swiss Re 62 syndication 62 Syriza 306 T Taibbi, Matt 55 tailgating 102, 103, 104, 128, 129, 130, 136, 138, 140, 152, 155, 190–91, 200 Tainter, Joseph 277 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 125, 183 Fooled by Randomness 133 Tarbell, Ida 44, 54 TARGET2 system 184, 244 TARP programme 138 tax havens 123 Taylor, Martin 185 Taylor Bean and Whitaker 293 Tea Party 306 technological innovation 13, 185, 187 Tel Aviv, Israel 171 telecommunications network 181, 182 Tesla Motors 168 Tetra 168 TfL 159 Thai exchange rate, collapse of (1997) 39 Thain, John 300 Thatcher, Margaret 18, 23, 54, 59, 148, 151, 157 Thiel, Peter 167 Third World debt problem 37, 131 thrifts 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 174, 290, 292 ticket touts 94–5 Tobin, James 273 Tobin tax 273–4 Tolstoy, Count Leo 97 Tonnies, Ferdinand 17 ‘too big to fail’ 75, 140, 276, 277 Tourre, Fabrice ‘Fabulous Fab’ 63–4, 115, 118, 232, 293, 294 trader model 82, 83 trader, rise of the 16–24 elements of the new trading culture 21–2 factors contributing to the change 17–18 foreign exchange 18–19 from personal relationships to anonymous markets 17 hedge fund managers 23 independent traders 22–3 information technology 19–20 regulation 20 securitisation 20–21 shift from agency to trading 16 trading as a principal source of revenue and remuneration 17 trader model 82, 83 ‘trading book’ 320n20 transparency 29, 84, 205, 210, 212, 226, 260 Travelers Group 33, 34, 48 ‘treasure islands’ 122–3 Treasuries 75 Treasury (UK) 135, 158 troubled assets relief program 135 Truman, Harry S. 230, 325n13 trust 83–4, 85, 182, 213, 218, 260–61 Tuckett, David 43, 71, 79 tulip mania (1630s) 35 Turner, Adair 303 TWA 238 Twain, Mark: Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar 95–6 Twitter 185 U UBS 33, 134 UK Independence Party 306 unemployment 73, 74, 79 unit trusts 202 United States global dominance of the finance industry 218 house prices 41, 43, 149, 174 stock bubble (1929) 201 universal banks 26–7, 33 University of Chicago 19, 69 ‘unknown unknowns’ 67 UPS delivery system 279–80 US Defense Department 167 US Steel 44 US Supreme Court 228, 229, 304 US Treasury 36, 38, 135 utility networks 181–2 V value discovery 226–7 value horizon 109 Van Agtmael, Antoine 39 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 44 Vanguard 200, 207, 213 venture capital 166 firms 27, 168 venture capitalists 171, 172 Vickers Commission 194 Viniar, David 204–5, 233, 282, 283, 284 VISA 186 volatility 85, 93, 98, 103, 131, 255 Volcker, Paul 150, 181 Volcker Rule 194 voluntary agencies 258 W wagers and credit default swaps 119 defined 61 at Lloyd’s coffee house 71–2 lottery tickets 65 Wall Street, New York 1, 16, 312n2 careers in 15 rivalry with London 13 staffing of 217 Wall Street Crash (1929) 20, 25, 27, 36, 127, 201 Wall Street Journal 294 Wallenberg family 108 Walmart 81, 83 Warburg 134 Warren, Elizabeth 237 Washington consensus 39 Washington Mutual 135, 149 Wasserstein, Bruce 204, 205 Watergate affair 240 ‘We are the 99 per cent’ slogan 52, 305 ‘We are Wall Street’ 16, 55, 267–8, 271, 300, 301 Weber, Max 17 Weill, Sandy 33–4, 35, 48–51, 55, 91, 149, 293, 314n40 Weinstock, Arnold 48 Welch, Jack 45–6, 48, 50, 52, 126, 314n40 WestLB 169 Westminster Bank 24 Whitney, Richard 292 Wilson, Harold 18 windfall payments 14, 32, 127, 153, 290 winner’s curse 103, 104, 156, 318n11 Winslow Jones, Alfred 23 Winton Capital 111 Wolfe, Humbert 7 The Uncelestial City 1 Wolfe, Tom 268 The Bonfire of the Vanities 16, 22 women traders 22 Woodford, Neil 108 Woodward, Bob: Maestro 240 World Bank 14, 220 World.Com bonds 197 Wozniak, Steve 162 Wriston, Walter 37 Y Yellen, Janet 230–31 Yom Kippur War (1973) 36 YouTube 185 Z Zurich, Switzerland 62


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

Of the allegations against him, Maluf asks, poking his finger in the air, “Have you ever seen one bit of proof? One bit?” “No one ever finds anything,” the guy concedes with a chagrined smile. He says this because most people don’t read court documents for fun. But one case from the British island of Jersey shows in detail how Maluf works. Jersey is a notorious tax haven, but like Switzerland in recent years, it’s bowed to international pressure for better transparency and cooperation with outside investigators. So its courts moved quickly when Brazilian prosecutors brought a civil suit in 2009 seeking to recover ten million dollars Maluf had stashed there. The suit centered on a road that gained fame as the most expensive in the world, mile for mile: Roberto Marinho Avenue.

I saw other similarities, as in the structure of their alleged schemes. According to the 2009 case Macedo is fighting, pastors would deliver undeclared cash donations in garbage sacks to doleiros—black-market money changers—who spirited the funds to bank accounts in New York and then to shell companies in offshore tax havens. To bring the now-anonymous money back into Brazil, the shell companies made loans to pastors to invest in a slew of private businesses: security firms, accounting firms, travel agencies, an air-taxi business, even a health insurance provider. To expand Record’s national network, they also used the money to acquire regional TV stations.

From an interview with Tênis Brasil, quoted in Oliveira, “O legado de Lemann.” 204Lemann never made a secret of his philanthropy. Lemann’s press people provided details on his gifts. 2043G’s funds in the Cayman Islands. Filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show 3G Capital’s funds domiciled in the Caribbean tax haven. 205one of his foundations awarded a scholarship. Verônica Serra received a scholarship from Fundação Estudar. 205calling for higher taxes on billionaires. In Warren E. Buffett, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” New York Times, August 14, 2011. 205Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. Details from David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2006), with quote from Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2006). 206“These guys have so much power through their wealth.”


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

two-thirds of all Fortune 500 companies It takes less than an hour to incorporate a company in Delaware, and the state regularly tops lists of domestic and foreign tax havens because it allows companies to lower their taxes in another state—for instance, the state in which they actually do business or have their headquarters—by shifting royalties and similar revenues to holding companies in Delaware, where they are not taxed. Between 2002 and 2012 the “Delaware loophole” had reduced taxes paid by corporations to other states by an estimated $9.5 billion. See, for example, Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/​2012/​07/​01/​business/​how-delaware-thrives-as-a-corporate-tax-haven.html.

See, for example, Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/​2012/​07/​01/​business/​how-delaware-thrives-as-a-corporate-tax-haven.html. For the latest statistics on how many businesses Delaware hosts, see the state’s official website at State of Delaware, Division of Corporations, “About Agency,” last modified 2018, https://corp.delaware.gov/​aboutagency.shtml. Patagonia’s much-publicized commitment For example, the company prides itself in its reliance on “Fair Trade”–certified factories, and in December 2017 it joined a coalition of like-minded institutions to sue the Trump administration in an effort to strike down the president’s “extreme overreach of authority” in revoking the national monument status of Bear’s Ears in Utah.


pages: 441 words: 124,798

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, centre right, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, fulfillment center, invisible hand, labor-force participation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, single-payer health, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

The company was virtually unheard of: Michael Moore, “Lodi Plant Owners Known for Wealth, Philanthrophy,” Hackensack Record (NJ), April 27, 1995. As its patent was set to expire: Stacy Wong, “Thrust Under Microscope, Stamford Drug Company’s Low Profile Shattered by Controversy Over Abuse of Painkiller OxyContin,” Hartford Courant, Sept. 2, 2001. launched in the nation’s best-known corporate tax haven: Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012. Because corporations can lower their taxes by shifting royalties and other revenues to holding companies in Delaware, where they are not taxed, the state is particularly appealing to shell companies. “If you take the medicine”: Barry Meier, Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death (New York: Rodale Press, 2003), 43.

Famously private, the brothers were better known for their philanthropy than for their drug-developing prowess, counting among their friends British royalty, Nobel Prize winners, and executives of the many Sackler-named art wings from the Smithsonian to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Promotion and sales were managed by the company’s marketing arm, Purdue Pharma, launched in the nation’s best-known corporate tax haven—Delaware. Purdue Pharma touted the safety of its new opioid-delivery system everywhere its merchants went. “If you take the medicine like it is prescribed, the risk of addiction when taking an opioid is one-half of 1 percent,” said Dr. J. David Haddox, a pain specialist who became the company’s point man for the drug.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

After all, a secret police without a state becomes a mafia, and ideological “inquisition” without a ruling party is reduced to a sulking sect. The territorial and economic units of the former U.S.S.R., by comparison, proved fabulously endowed for the self-aggrandizing separatism. Who could now remove a national president for life or a private capitalist oligarch with his assets stashed away in an exotic tax haven? The Soviet industrial assets by various brutally simple schemes were snatched into private control (admittedly a mild way of saying stolen) even before privatization was sanctioned by any legislation. Meanwhile national republics and city halls also became corporate property of the kind that Americans call “political machines.”

The politically and financially cumbersome colonialism of yesteryear was replaced in the newest era of globalization by the indirect controls of powerful institutions of debt and the global network of American military bases, as well as the softer power of international advising, global mass media, and shared norms inculcated in the younger peripheral elites by acquiring prestigious diplomas in business and government administration from American universities. To this list of novel disciplining institutions, we should add illicit opportunities for money laundering through the global archipelago of microjurisdictions functioning as tax havens. The few remaining noncompliant and intransigent “rogue states” could be relegated to the Axis of Evil and serve a useful ideological function as the atrocious other. These splendid designs ran into the structural realities of the world-system that had been profoundly transformed during the twentieth century.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

‘Walmart China Closes Chongqing Stores Amidst Pork Mislabeling Scandal’, published on 10 October 2011 at: www.huffingtonpost.com 13. Organisations specialised in ethical labelling generally do not say a word about the fiscal practices of their clients. Many multinationals that claim to work for a ‘fairer’ world do not pay taxes either in producing countries or in consumer countries. Through tax havens, they are able to minimise their tax bill. For example, these practices are observed for the three largest companies that account for more than two-thirds of the global banana market: Dole, Chiquita and Fresh Del Monte. An investigation by The Guardian has shown that these three companies: had combined global sales of over $50bn (£24bn) in the last five years, and made $1.4bn of profits.

., 132, 156(n4) Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, Bird-friendly Coffee programme, 54 Social capital, 101, 117, 119 Solidaridad, 3, 38–9, 114; see also Roozen Solomon Islands, 135 Somalia, 135 SOS Wereldhandel; see Fair Trade Organisatie Spaghetti bowl, 27 South Africa, 136, 137, 159(n20), 162(n21) South South relations, 80, 149, 163(n2) Sri Lanka, 134 STABEX, see Export earnings stabilisation system Starbucks, 77, 78, 150; Coffee and farmer equity practices, 55 Stigler, Georges, 42 Stiglitz, Joseph E. and Charlton, Andrew, 31–3, 66 Structural adjustment policies, 17, 18, 42 Structuralist school, 37–8 Sudan, 135 Sugar, 16, 27, 30, 36, 60–2, 80, 85, 90 Sustainable Agriculture Network, 53 Sustainability, 4, 24, 34, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 70, 79, 113, 138, 142, 149–50, 158(n5) Sustainable development, 4, 34, 47, 55, 70, 82, 83, 156(n2), 163(n1) Sustainable Fair Trade Management System, 45; see also World Fair Trade Organization Sweden, 63, 162(n29) Switzerland, 53, 127, 128 System for Minerals (Sysmin), 155(n2) Taiwan, 155(n1) Tanzania, United Republic of, 134, 135 Tariff escalation, 26–8, 30 Tariff peaks, 30 Tax havens, 157(n13) Tea, 40, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56, 80, 130, 133, 134, 136 Ten Thousand Villages, 35–6 Thailand, 155(n1) Thatcher, Margaret, 42 Third Worldism, 36–40, 120 Times (the), 160(n2) Timor Leste, 135 Togo, 134, 135, 155(n2) Torrens, Robert, 65 Trade not aid (slogan), 38, 40, 126 Trade structure, 9, 10, 133–8, 141, 154, 163(n2); see also Developing countries Traders, 20, 44, 49, 86, 106, 116–17, 140 Transfair USA, additional income transferred, 125, 128, 130–1, 153; 161(n9), 161(n11); budget and licensee fees, 127–8, 153; exit from Fairtrade, 161(n13); name change, 161(n9); sales, 161(n10) Tribune (La), 159(n18) Truman, Harry, 34, 35 Turkey, 155(n1) Tuvalu, 135 UCIRI (Union de Comunidades Indigenas de la Region del Istmo), 98, 157(n4) Uganda, 134, 135, 138 Un Comtrade, 20, 134 Underdevelopment, see development Unequal exchange, 1–2, 16–22, 25, 37, 62, 76, 120, 132, 133; unequal ecological exchange, 22–4 United Nations, 10, 144, 155(n4) United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 20–1, 38, 133, 134, 135, 154, 162(n19), 162(n21), 163(n2) United Kingdom, 8, 25, 31, 32, 36, 46, 53, 56–7, 60–2, 64–9, 71, 127, 128, 132 United States, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 42, 46, 53, 54, 61, 63, 67, 71, 79, 90, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 136, 156(n2), 158(n8), 158(n9); American System, 26, 67; United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 138; see also Transfair USA UTZ Certified, 54, 55, 56, 70 Van der Hoff, Frans, 3, 38–43, 87–9, 98, 139, 158(n4), 158(n5), 162(n26), 163(n1) 178 Sylla T02779 02 index 178 28/11/2013 13:04 index Vanuatu, 135 Vent for surplus theory, 65 Vertical integration, 19–21, 41 Vietnam, 74 Wage, 79, 80, 158(n7), 160(n26), 160(n27), 161(n5); minimum wage, 51, 95, 98; reservation wage, 94–5; wage employment, 19, 72, 94, 123–4, 128, 131, 133, 137, 142, 162(n22) Wal-Mart, 78, 79 Washington Consensus, 73 Wealth of Nations, see Smith, Adam West Indies, 60–2, Williams, Eric, 60–2 Williamson, Jeffrey G., 162(n27) World Bank, 17, 31, 42; development indicators, 9, 10–12, 15, 30, 89, 131, 137, 153, 161(n7, n14, n17) World Fair Trade Organization, 44–5, 46, 80, 151 World-system theory, 76 World Trade Organization, 26, 28, 29, 31–3, 74, 144, 155(n3) Yemen, 135 Zambia, 135 179 Sylla T02779 02 index 179 28/11/2013 13:04 Sylla T02779 02 index 180 28/11/2013 13:04


pages: 233 words: 73,772

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The World Bank, which found that America is the top destination for corrupt politicians trying to set up shell companies to access the financial system, supports the same goals. Yet Levin’s bill has gone nowhere, thanks to opposition from the United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, and the state of Delaware, America’s premier tax haven, where corporations outnumber people. “You can no longer open an account at a respectable bank merely with a suitcase of cash,” the Economist has written in an editorial. “Let the same apply to starting a limited company.” As long as those loopholes remain open there is nothing to prevent future Teodorins from laundering their money in the United States and using the country as their personal shopping mall just as he has.

Glencore’s physical presence in the United States is modest; it has minor holdings in a few American companies and an office in Stamford, Connecticut, that helps run its oil and gas trading business. But its global market power and reach make its operations important to American policy makers as well as to the public. “Wherever you turn in the world of commodities, you bump into Glencore,” says Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands, a book about tax havens and an associate fellow at the British think tank Chatham House. “It is twice as big as Koch Industries, and it has an unhealthy grip on some of the world’s most important commodity markets, with influence that stretches from Texas to Tehran to Taipei.” Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader, echoes that assessment.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

We have political donors who buy influence, we have legislators who represent private interests, and we have companies who put prominent, unqualified political/military people on their boards to gain credibility. Why was Jim Mattis on the board of Theranos, a scam company? Also: corruption in places like Ukraine and Russia is facilitated by American banks and by offshore tax havens that exist because the US government tolerates them. And why does the US government tolerate them? Because very wealthy people use them.6 Donald Trump supposed US power rested on military hardware and the readiness to use violence. He never understood how much of American power came from other people’s idea of America as a land of hope and promise.

., 18 Napoleon, 65 National Enquirer, 109 National Guard, 93 nationalism, 50–51, 62–63, 196 National Lynching Memorial, 117 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 126 National Rifle Association (NRA), 59, 61 National Security Agency (NSA), 45 National Security staff, 88, 96–97 Navajo Generating Station, 118 Naval Operations Chief, 92 Nazism, 64, 145 NBC, 24, 59 Nebraska, 184 Neller, Robert, 92 Netherlands, 133 Never Trumpers, 90 New Black Panthers, 69 New Hampshire, 76 New Jersey, 75 New Orleans, 80 Newton, Isaac, 157 New York City, 83, 163 New York magazine, 109 New York State, 75, 118, 184–86 New York Times, 41, 43, 46, 61, 65, 95, 102, 111, 118, 194 New Zealand, 55–56, 162, 177 Nicaragua, 108 Nixon, Richard, 62, 82, 85, 99–100, 105, 125, 198 No Child Left Behind Act (2002), 140 Nolte, John, 149 Noonan, Peggy, 196 Norquist, Grover, 196 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 41, 112, 178 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 45, 63, 93–94 North Carolina, 76, 78, 80, 123 North Dakota, 122, 164 Northeastern University, 55 North Korea, 44–46, 48–49, 169, 171–72 nuclear energy, 164, 166–67 nuclear weapons, 93–94, 180 Oak Ridge nuclear complex, 167 Obama, Barack, 12, 15, 64, 130–31, 136, 178, 183, 196–97 ACA and, 134–35 bin Laden and, 95–96 China and, 177 climate change and, 152 elections of 2010 and, 79 foreign policy and, 171, 179 immigration and, 21, 24, 106 Iran and, 172 Islamic world and, 53–54, 179 Obama, Michelle, 26 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 147, 167 oceans, 155–56 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 102 offshore tax havens, 102, 174 Ohio, 78, 82–83 oil and gas (fossil fuels), 42, 94, 127, 150, 153–56, 161, 163–64 One American News Network (OANN), 15 O’Neill, Brendan, 149 O’Neill, Tip, 127 Orbán, Viktor, 67, 69, 143 Oregon, 118 O’Reilly, Bill, 15 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 132 Ornstein, Norman, 77 Owens, Candace, 64 Paddock, Stephen, 55 Pakistan, 88–89, 95, 173–75, 180 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 60 Palin, Sarah, 83, 84 Panama, 45, 108 Paris Bastille Day parade, 90–91 Paris climate accords, 41, 162 Parnas, Lev, 89, 190 Patriot Prayer, 60 Pegler, Westbrook, 83 Pence, Mike, 4, 26, 35, 63 Pennsylvania, 82–83, 118, 186 Perkins, Tony, 3, 75 Perón, Eva, 18 pharmaceutical companies, 133 Philadelphia, 184, 186 Philippines, 44–45, 146 Pierce, William, 60 Pittsburgh, 186 synagogue shooting, 56, 61 plastics, 118, 156, 160 Playboy, 49 Poland, 50, 66–67, 89, 93, 193 polarization, 15, 130–31, 137–38, 187 political correctness, 15, 110 poll taxes, 71 pollution, 159–61 Pompeo, Michael, 47, 171 population distribution, 75–79, 83, 121–22 Prager, Dennis, 149 progressives, 107–8, 110–13 protectionism, 3, 50, 161 Proud Boys, 60–61 public schools, 136–37, 140–41 Pulse nightclub shootings, 53–55 Putin, Vladimir, 3, 32–33, 44, 48, 63–64, 89, 176, 197 QAnon, 34 Quartz, 156 race and racism, 5–6, 43, 56–58, 62–63, 65–66, 107, 111–12, 127, 140–41, 191 voting and, 71, 80–81 Reagan, Ronald, 18, 39, 51, 62, 105–6, 181, 191 real estate, 120 recessions, 12, 127, 144 recycling, 159–60 red flag laws, 117 redistricting, 84 red meat consumption, 163 reform, recommendations for consensus and, 118–19 DC statehood and, 122–23 filibuster and, 120–22 gerrymandering and, 124–25 law enforcement and, 125–26 presidential tax returns and, 119–20 regulation, 127, 188 Reid, Harry, 121 Republican National Convention 2008 (St.


pages: 431 words: 132,416

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos

Alan Greenspan, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, financial engineering, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, offshore financial centre, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, your tax dollars at work

They believed that the worst that could happen was that he could get caught and go to prison for a long, long time; but they would get to keep their ill-gotten returns and would get their principals back because they were offshore investors and the U.S. courts have no legal hold on them. But for me, the most chilling discovery of this trip was the fact that many of these funds were operating offshore. It was not something that was spoken about; it was just something I picked up in conversation. Offshore funds are known as tax havens, places for people to quietly hide money so governments won’t know about it. It’s a means of avoiding law-enforcement and tax authorities. They’re particularly popular in nations with high tax brackets, like France. While offshore funds certainly can be completely legitimate, to me it indicated that at least some of these funds were handling dirty money, untaxed money.

While offshore funds certainly can be completely legitimate, to me it indicated that at least some of these funds were handling dirty money, untaxed money. An offshore fund allows investors from a high-tax jurisdiction to pretend their income is coming from a low- or no-tax jurisdiction. While I have no direct knowledge, I definitely don’t believe that all income from offshore tax havens is eventually declared to the proper government. But what was a lot more frightening to me was the fact that offshore investments are used by some very dangerous people to launder a lot of money. It is common knowledge that offshore funds are used by members of organized crime and the drug cartels that have billions of dollars and no legitimate place to invest them.

See also trade tickets Options Option transactions Order flow and market intelligence payments for Organized crime Over-the-counter market Parkway Capital Payne, Gerald Pearlman, Lou Penna, Nick Personal danger Petters, Tom Pharmaceutical fraud Picower, Jeffrey Plaintiff’s firms Plan administrators Police department Ponzi, Charles Ponzi schemes examples of Harry Markopolos describes to SEC human damage from mechanics of new money requirements Weisman on Ponzi scheme vs. front-running Potemkin trading desk (front) Professional ethics Proof, legal vs. mathematical Prospect Capital Putnam Investments Quants (quantitative analysts) Qui tam cases Qui tam provisions Rampart Investment Management Company Rampart Option Management System Rampart Option Statistical Advantage Rating agencies Red flags Regulatory corruption Reid, Douglas Realtors Renaissance Technologies LLC Reporting Reverse engineering Rewards Ricciardi, Walter Rich, Mark Richards, Lori Risk assumption Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Rosenthal, Stu Royal Bank of Canada Royalty Russian default Russian mafia S&P 500 S&P 500 options Sailing Scannell, Peter Schadt, Rudi Schapiro, Mary Schulman, Diane Schumer, Chuck Schwager, Jack Secrecy Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): 2005 submission disclosure audits BDO mishandles Harry Markopolos filing Bernie Madoff and bounty program changes at Chuck Schumer call to in congressional hearings criminal investigation damage by inaction of danger from disregards Harry Markopolos complaint Division of Enforcement actions double standard examination team excuses first report to Harry Markopolos meets Garrity Harry Markopolos on Harry Markopolos reports fraud to Harry Markopolos visits ignores Harry Markopolos complaint impact on incompetence of informal inquiry Inspector General Inspector General findings Inspector General investigation Inspector General review investigation of Bernie Madoff jurisdictional problems liability of MARHedge reporting market timing complaint New York regional office New York office incompetence Office of Economic Analysis origins of post BM arrest cover-up powers of regulatory priorities rejects Harry Markopolos market timing investigation resignations from sovereign immunity and negligence systemic incompetence visits Madoff warnings from others whistleblower program See also Cheung, Meaghan; Garrity,Mike; Kotz, David; Manion, Edward; Ward, Grant: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) teams: accounting audit enforcement examination inspection investigative Securities Exchange Company Security Segel, Jim Seghers, Conrad Self-regulation Senate Banking Committee Sennen (sailing vessel) Sherman, Brad Short volatility 60 Minutes Skilling, Jeff Slatkin, Reed Social networking Société Générale Sokobin, Jonathan Sorkin, Ira Lee Sovereign immunity and negligence Spitzer, Eliot Split-strike conversion strategy State Street Corporation Steiber, Heide Stein, Ben Stock picking Strategy analysis Structured products Subsidization theory Suh, Simona Suicides Sutton, Willie Tax havens Taxpayers Against Fraud. See also whistleblowers Taylor, Hunt Teahan, Kathleen Teams. See fraud investigation team; Madoff investigation team Terrorists Tewksbury Investment Fund Theft The Nature of Risk (Mamis) “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud” (Harry Markopolos) Thomsen, Linda Thorp, Edward “To Catch a Thief” (Absolute Return) To Catch a Thief (movie) Trade tickets Trading violations Treasury bill (T-bill) holdings Tremont (fund) U.S.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

DAS_Z01.QXP 8/11/06 316 2:10 PM Page 316 Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y Like all things, the real skill is not obvious It is all about when to get – it is all about when to get out. In rogue out. In rogue trading, it is trading, it is when to take off with the when to take off with the boodle to a tax haven with no extradition treaties. You can’t teach anybody that. boodle to a tax haven with Warren Buffet seems to have recently no extradition treaties. discovered the problems in the derivatives industry. ‘I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almost invariably they have favoured the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus . . .

There was a competition amongst dealers to come up with distinctive names for their vehicles. One British structured product professional seemed to be an avid monarchist. He named his vehicles EARLS, CROWNS, CORONETS, etc. The basic ingredients were identical to those used in the pioneering BECS transactions. The key was a SPV located in a tax haven, frequently DAS_C08.QXP 8/7/06 234 4:49 PM Page 234 Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y the Cayman Islands or British Virgin Islands. The structures were ‘orphan subsidiaries’; that is, the investment bank didn’t own the vehicle. This was so that it was ‘bankruptcy remote’: if anything happened to the investment bank then your money was safe.


pages: 565 words: 134,138

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas, Jack Farchy

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, Great Grain Robbery, invisible hand, John Deuss, junk bonds, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

The commodity traders were on hand to show the early oligarchs how to export their goods, helping them earn the seed capital that allowed them to buy up large swathes of the Russian economy as it was privatised. They linked the Russians to the world of Western finance, helping in some cases to teach them the tricks of tax havens and offshore shells that commodity traders had been employing for decades. For example, traders at the Lausanne-based grain trader André struck up a relationship with the most powerful oligarch of that era, Boris Berezovsky. Intelligent, mercurial and arrogant, Berezovsky was, for a time in the 1990s, Russia’s richest and most influential man – the ‘godfather of the Kremlin’, in the words of Paul Klebnikov, a prominent American journalist who was assassinated in Moscow in 2004.

Crucial to the investigation were the Iraqi government’s own meticulous accounts of all the illicit surcharges paid by the commodity traders, which became available to the UN investigators after the toppling of Saddam Hussein following the US invasion in 2003. The report detailed, barrel by barrel and bank transfer by bank transfer, how Iraq’s oil trade moved into the shadows after Baghdad started demanding surcharges. The oil was handed off from one company to another via a network of practically anonymous entities incorporated in tax havens. Trafigura used an off-the-shelf Bahamian company called Roundhead; Vitol channelled payments via a mysterious British Virgin Islands outfit called Peakville Limited, whose wire transfers listed as a contact person Vitol’s top accountant in Geneva; Oscar Wyatt paid through two companies in Cyprus that had been created just after the surcharges were imposed.

The investment that connected them to one of the most febrile regions of the Middle East could have been a parable for the modern-day financial system, where money is passed between anonymous vehicles in low-tax, low-scrutiny jurisdictions. Their money’s journey from Pennsylvania, South Carolina and West Virginia to northern Iraq had involved stops in George Town, the capital of the notoriously opaque tax haven of the Cayman Islands; Dublin, the finance-friendly Irish capital; Mayfair, the moneyed district at the heart of London; and Dubai, the glitzy emirate that is a hub for Middle Eastern money. If the American pensioners had looked at the annual reports of their funds, they probably wouldn’t have been any the wiser.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Until they can contribute convertible currency to the I.M.F. and World Bank like the dollar, euro and yen, they cannot be at the heart of the system. Obama should try to organize his emergency economic stimulus package in the U.S. in tandem with efforts by the Europeans, Japanese and Chinese. It will be much more effective if it is coordinated internationally. He should be uncompromising about the need to end the destabilizing role of tax havens as sources of dodgy lending and tax evasion—a position on which he has staked out ground before his election. Many are under British jurisdiction, and he should combine with France’s President Sarkozy—rotating head of the EU until Christmas—to insist that Britain join with the rest of the world to constrain if not eliminate an important source of financial destabilization.

We need a paradigm shift toward a greater acceptance of global principles, rules and governance by both banks and governments. We need global rules on the terms and means by which banks are recapitalized and how they are bailed out of their bad loans. Banks need to accept that the world has changed. We need global rules on hedge funds, tax havens and derivative trading. And we need Western governments to lead in de-risking the system by declaring their willingness to manage the values of their currencies in predictable zones. This is what we need. Obama, if he is to be a great reforming president, needs to combine his reforming zeal at home with no less zeal abroad to ensure we get it.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Moreover, we have always lived in a knowledge economy in the sense that it has always been a command over superior knowledge, rather than the physical nature of activities, that has ultimately decided which country is rich or poor. Indeed, most societies are still making more and more things. It is mainly because those who make things have become so much more productive that things have become cheaper, in relative terms, than services that we think we don’t consume as many things as before. Unless you are a tiny tax haven (a status that is going to become more and more difficult to maintain, following the 2008 crisis), such as Luxemburg and Monaco, or a small country floating on oil, such as Brunei or Kuwait, you have to become better at making things in order to raise your living standard. Switzerland and Singapore, which are often touted as post-industrial success stories, are in fact two of the most industrialized economies in the world.

Index active economic citizenship xvi, xvii Administrative Behaviour (Simon) 173–4 Africa see Sub-Saharan Africa AIG 172–3 Air France 131 AOL 132–3 apartheid 214–16 Argentina education and growth 181 growth 73 hyperinflation 53–4 Austria geography 121 government direction 132 protectionism 70 balance of payments 97–100, 101 Baldursson, Fridrik 235 Bangladesh entrepreneurship 159–60 and microfinance 161–2, 163, 164 Bank of England 252 (second) Bank of the USA 68 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 262 bankruptcy law 227–8 Barad, Jill 154 Bard College 172 Bateman, Milford 162 Baugur 233 Baumol, William 250 Bebchuk, Lucian 154 behaviouralist school 173–4 Belgium ethnic division 122 income inequality 144, 146 manufacturing 70, 91 R&D funding 206 standard of living 109 Benin, entrepreneurship 159 Bennett, Alan 214 Besley, Tim 246 big government 221–2, 260–61 and growth 228–30 see also government direction; industrial policy BIS (Bank for International Settlements) 262 Black, Eugene 126 Blair, Tony 82, 143, 179 borderless world 39–40 bounded rationality theory 168, 170, 173–7, 250, 254 Brazilian inflation 55 Britain industrial dominance/decline 89–91 protectionism 69–70 British Academy 246–7 British Airways 131 brownfield investment 84 Brunei 258 Buffet, Warren 30, 239 Bukharin, Nikolai 139 Bunning, Senator Jim 8 Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) 121, 200 Bush, George W. 8, 158, 159, 174 Bush Sr, George 207 business sector see corporate sector Cameroon 116 capital mobility 59–60 nationality 74–5, 76–7 capitalism Golden Age of 142, 147, 243 models 253–4 capitalists, vs. workers 140–42 captains of industry 16 Carnegie, Andrew 15 Case, Steve 132–3 Cassano, Joe 172–3 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) 238 CDSs (credit default swaps) 238 CEO compensation see executive pay, in US Cerberus 77–8 Chavez, Hugo 68 chess, complexity of 175–6 child-labour regulation 2–3, 197 China business regulation 196 communes 216 economic officials 244 industrial predominance 89, 91, 93, 96 as planned economy 203–4 PPP income 107 protectionism and growth 63–4, 65 Chocolate mobile phone 129 Chrysler 77–8, 191 Chung, Ju-Yung 129 Churchill, Winston 253 climate factors 120–21 Clinton, Bill 143 cognitive psychology 173–4 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 238 collective entrepreneurship 165 communist system 200–204 Concorde project 130–31 conditions of trade 5 Confucianism 212–13 Congo (Democratic Republic) 116, 121 consumption smoothing 163 cooperatives 166 corporate sector importance 190–91 planning in 207–9 regulation effect 196–8 suspicion of 192–3 see also regulation; transnational corporations Cotton Factories Regulation Act 1819 2 credit default swaps (CDSs) 238 Crotty, Jim 236–8 culture issues 123, 212–13 Daimler-Benz 77–8 Darling, Alistair 172 de-industrialization 91 balance of payments 97–100, 101 causes 91–6 concerns 96–9 deflation, Japan 54 deliberation councils 134 Denmark cooperatives 166 protectionism 69 standard of living 104, 106, 232–3 deregulation see under regulation derivatives 239 Detroit car-makers 191–2 developing countries entrepreneurship and poverty 158–60 and free market policies 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 policy space 262–3 digital divide 39 dishwashers 34 distribution of income see downward redistribution of income; income irregularity; upward redistribution of income domestic service 32–3 double-dip recession xiii downward redistribution of income 142–3, 146–7 Dubai 235 Duménil, Gérard 236 East Asia economic officials 249–50 educational achievements 180–81 ethnic divisions 122–3 government direction 131–2 growth 42, 56, 243–4 industrial policy 125–36, 205 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) 133 economic crises 247 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) 144, 150 economists alternative schools 248–51 as bureaucrats 242–3 collective imagination 247 and economic growth 243–5 role in economic crises 247–8 Ecuador 73 Edgerton, David 37 Edison, Thomas 15, 165, 166 education and enterprise 188–9 higher education effect 185–8 importance 178–9 knowledge economy 183–5 mechanization effect 184–5 outcome equality 217–18 and productivity 179–81 relevance 182–3 Elizabeth II, Queen 245–7 ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) 133 enlightened self-interest 255–6 entrepreneurship, and poverty 157–8 and collective institutions 165–7 as developing country feature 158–60 finance see microfinance environmental regulations 3 EPI (Economic Policy Institute) 144, 150 equality of opportunity 210–11, 256–7 and equality of outcome 217–20, 257 and markets 213–15 socio-economic environment 215–17 equality of outcome 217–20 ethnic divisions 122–3 executive pay and non-market forces 153–6 international comparisons 152–3 relative to workers’ pay 149–53, 257 US 148–9 fair trade, vs. free trade 6–7 Fannie Mae 8 Far Eastern Economic Review 196 Federal Reserve Board (US) 171, 172, 246 female occupational structure 35–6 Fiat 78 financial crisis (2008) xiii, 155–6, 171–2, 233–4, 254 financial derivatives 239, 254–5 financial markets deregulation 234–8, 259–60 effects 239–41 efficiency 231–2, 240–41 sector growth 237–9 Finland government direction 133 income inequality 144 industrial production 100 protectionism 69, 70 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Fischer, Stanley 54 Ford cars 191, 237 Ford, Henry 15, 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) 83–5 France and entrepreneurship 158 financial deregulation 236 government direction 132, 133–4, 135 indicative planning 204–5 protectionism 70 Frank, Robert H 151 Franklin, Benjamin 65–6, 67 Freddie Mac 8 free market boundaries 8–10 and developing countries 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 labour see under labour nineteenth-century rhetoric 140–43 as political definition 1–2 rationale xiii–xiv, 169–70 results xiv–xv, xvi–xvii system redesign 252, 263 see also markets; neo-liberalism free trade, vs. fair trade 6–7 Fried, Jesse 154 Friedman, Milton 1, 169, 214 Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 245 Garicano, Luis 245 Gates, Bill 165, 166, 200 General Electric (GE) 17, 45, 86, 237 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) 194, 237 General Motors (GM) 20, 22, 45, 80, 86, 154, 190–98 decline 193–6 financialization 237 pre-eminence 191–2 geographical factors 121 Germany blitzkrieg mobility 191 CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 emigration 69 hyperinflation 52–4 industrial policy 205 manufacturing 90 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 228–9 Ghana, entrepreneurship 159 Ghosn, Carlos 75–6, 78 globalization of management 75–6 and technological change 40 GM see General Motors GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) 194, 237 Golden Age of Capitalism 142, 147, 243 Goldilocks economy 246 Goodwin, Sir Fred 156 Gosplan 145 government direction balance of results 134–6 and business information 132–4 failure examples 130–31 and market discipline 44–5, 129–30, 134 share ownership 21 success examples 125–6, 131–4 see also big government; industrial policy Grameen Bank 161–4 Grant, Ulysses 67 Great Depression 1929 24, 192, 236, 249, 252 greenfield investment 84 Greenspan, Alan 172, 246 Hamilton, Alexander 66–7, 69 Hayami, Masaru 54 Hennessy, Peter 246–7 higher education 185–8 Hirschman, Albert 249 History Boys (Bennett) 214 Hitler, Adolf 54 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 Honda 135 Hong Kong 71 household appliances 34–6, 37 HSBC 172 Human relations school 47 Hungary, hyperinflation 53–4 hyperinflation 52–4 see also inflation Hyundai Group 129, 244 Iceland financial crisis 232–4, 235 foreign debt 234 standard of living 104–5 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) 39 ILO (International Labour Organization) 32, 143–4 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration control 5, 23, 26–8, 30 income per capita income 104–11 see also downward redistribution of income; income inequality; upward redistribution of income income inequality 18, 72–3, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 143–5, 147, 247–8, 253, 262 India 99, 121 indicative planning 205 indicative planning 204–6 Indonesia 234 industrial policy 84, 125–36, 199, 205, 242, 259, 261 see also government direction Industrial Revolution 70, 90, 243 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 inflation control 51–2 and growth 54–6, 60–61 hyperinflation 52–4 and stability 56–61 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 39 institutional quality 29–30, 112–13, 115, 117, 123–4, 165–7 interest rate control 5–6 international dollar 106–7 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32, 143–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54–5, 57, 66, 72, 244, 262 SAPs 118 International Year of Microcredit 162 internet revolution 31–2 impact 36–7, 38, 39 and rationality 174 investment brownfield/greenfield 84 foreign direct investment 83–5 share 18–19 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ireland financial crisis 234–5 Italy cooperatives 166 emigrants to US 103 Jackson, Andrew 68 Japan business regulation 196 CEO remuneration 152–3 deflation 54 deliberation councils 134 government direction 133–4, 135, 259 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 131, 135, 242–5 industrial production 100 production system 47, 167 protectionism 62, 70 R&D funding 206 Jefferson, Thomas 67–8, 239 job security/insecurity 20, 58–61, 108–9, 111, 225–8, 247, 253, 259 Journal of Political Economy 34 Kaldor, Nicolas 249 Keynes, John Maynard 249 Kindleberger, Charles 249 knowledge economy 183–5 Kobe Steel 42–3, 46 Kong Tze (Confucius) 212 Korea traditional 211–13 see also North Korea; South Korea Koufax, Sandy 172 Kuwait 258 labour free market rewards 23–30 job security 58–60 in manufacturing 91–2 market flexibility 52 regulation 2–3 relative price 33, 34 Latin America 32–3, 55, 73, 112, 122, 140, 196–7, 211, 245, 262 Latvia 235 Lazonick, William 20 Lenin, Vladimir 138 Levin, Jerry 133 Lévy, Dominique 236 LG Group 129, 134 liberals neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73 nineteenth-century 140–42 limited liability 12–15, 21, 228, 239, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 37, 67 List, Friedrich 249 London School of Economics 245–6 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) 170–71 Luxemburg, standard of living 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 232–3, 258 macro-economic stability 51–61, 240, 259, 261 Madoff, Bernie 172 Malthus, Thomas 141 managerial capitalism 14–17 Mandelson, Lord (Peter) 82–3, 87 manufacturing industry comparative dynamism 96 employment changes 91–2 importance 88–101, 257–9 productivity rise 91–6, 184–5 relative prices 94–5 statistical changes 92–3 Mao Zedong 215–16 Marchionne, Sergio 78 markets and bounded rationality theory 168, 173–6, 177, 254 conditions of trade 5 and equality of opportunity 213–15 failure theories 250 financial see financial markets government direction 44–5, 125–36 government regulation 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 participation restrictions 4 price regulations 5–6 and self-interest 44–5 see also free market Marx, Karl 14, 198, 201, 208, 249 Marxism 80, 185, 201–3 mathematics 180, 182–3 MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) 238 medicine’s popularity 222–4 Merriwether, John 171 Merton, Robert 170–71 Michelin 75–6 microfinance critique 162 and development 160–62 Microsoft 135 Minsky, Hyman 249 Monaco 258 morality, as optical illusion 48–50 Morduch, Jonathan 162 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 238 motivation complexity 46–7 Mugabe, Robert 54 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 67 National Health Service (UK) 261 nationality of capital 74–87 natural resources 69, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2 neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73, 145 neo-classical school 250 see also free market Nestlé 76–7, 79 Netherlands CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 intellectual property rights 71 protectionism 71 welfare state and growth 228–9 New Public Management School 45 New York Times 37, 151 New York University 172 Nissan 75–6, 84, 135, 214 Nobel Peace Prize 162 Prize in economics 170, 171–2, 173, 208, 246 Nobel, Alfred 170 Nokia 135, 259–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 67 North Korea 211 Norway government direction 132, 133, 205 standard of living 104 welfare state and growth 222, 229 Obama, Barack 149 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 57, 159, 229 Oh, Won-Chul 244 Ohmae, Kenichi 39 Opel 191 Opium War 9 opportunities see equality of opportunity Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 57, 159, 229 organizational economy 208–9 outcomes equality 217–20 Palin, Sarah 113 Palma, Gabriel 237 Park, Chung-Hee 129 Park, Tae-Joon 127–8 participation restrictions 4 Perot, Ross 67 Peru 219 PGAM (Platinum Grove Asset Management) 171 Philippines, education and growth 180, 181 Phoenix Venture Holdings 86 Pigou, Arthur 250 Pinochet, Augusto 245 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 180 Plain English Campaign 175 planned economies communist system 200–204 indicative systems 204–6 survival 199–200, 208–9 Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM) 171 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) 127–8 pollution 3, 9, 169 poor individuals 28–30, 140–42, 216–18 Portes, Richard 235 Portman, Natalie 162 POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) 127–8 post-industrial society 39, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 98, 101, 257–8 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) 118 see also SAPs PPP (purchasing power parity) 106–9 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni 138–40, 141 price regulations 5–6 stability 51–61 Pritchett, Lant 181 private equity funds 85–6, 87 professional managers 14–22, 44–5, 166, 200 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 180 protectionism and growth 62–3, 72–3 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 positive examples 63–5, 69 PRSPs see Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers purchasing power parity (PPP) 106–9 R&D see research and development (R&D) Rai, Aishwarya 162 Rania, Queen 162 rationality see bounded rationality theory RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) 156 real demand effect 94 regulation business/corporate 196–8 child labour 2–3, 197 deregulation 234–8, 259–60 legitimacy 4–6 markets 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 price 5–6 Reinhart, Carmen 57, 59 Renault 21, 75–6 Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Hamilton) 66 The Rescuers (Disney animation) 113–14 research and development (R&D) 78–9, 87, 132, 166 funding 206 reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ricardo, David 141 rich individuals 28–30, 140–42 river transport 121 Rogoff, Kenneth 57, 59 Roodman, David 162 Roosevelt, Franklin 191 Rover 86 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 156 Rubinow, I.M. 34 Ruhr occupation 52 Rumsfeld, Donald 174–5 Rwanda 123 Santander 172 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 118, 124 Sarkozy, Nicolas 90 Scholes, Myron 170–71 Schumpeter, Joseph 16, 165–7, 249 Second World War planning 204 (second) Bank of the USA 68 self-interest 41–2, 45 critique 42–3 enlightened 255–6 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 and market discipline 44–5 and motivation complexity 46–7 Sen, Amartya 250 Senegal 118 service industries 92–3 balance of payments 97–100, 101 comparative dynamism 94–5, 96–7 knowledge-based 98, 99 Seychelles 100 share buybacks 19–20 shareholder value maximisation 17–22 shareholders government 21 ownership of companies 11 short-term interests 11–12, 19–20 shipbuilders 219 Simon, Herbert 173–6, 208–9, 250 Singapore government direction 133 industrial production 100 PPP income 107 protectionism 70 SOEs 205 Sloan Jr, Alfred 191–2 Smith, Adam 13, 14, 15, 41, 43, 169, 239 social dumping 67 social mobility 103–4, 220 socio-economic environment 215–17 SOEs (state-owned enterprises) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 South Africa 55, 121 and apartheid 213–16 South Korea bank loans 81 economic officials 244 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 123 financial drive 235 foreign debt 234 government direction 126–9, 133–4, 135, 136 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 125–36, 205, 242–5 inflation 55, 56 job insecurity effect 222–4, 226, 227 post-war 212–14 protectionism 62, 69, 70 R&D funding 206 regulation 196–7 Soviet Union 200–204 Spain 122 Spielberg, Steven 172 Sri Lanka 121 Stalin, Josef 139–40, 145 standard of living comparisons 105–7 US 102–11 Stanford, Alan 172 state owned enterprises (SOEs) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 steel mill subsidies 126–8 workers 219 Stiglitz, Joseph 250 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 118, 124 Sub-Saharan Africa 73, 112–24 culture issues 123 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 122–3 free market policies 118–19, 262 geographical factors 121 growth rates 73, 112, 116–19 institutional quality 123 natural resources 119–20, 121–2 structural conditions 114–16, 119–24 underdevelopment 112–13, 124 Sutton, Willie 52 Sweden 15, 21–2 CEO remuneration 152 income inequality 144 industrial policy 205 industrial production 100 per capita income 104 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Switzerland CEO remuneration 152–3 ethnic divisions 122 geography 121 higher education 185–6, 188 intellectual property rights 71 manufacturing 100, 258 protectionism 69, 71 standard of living 104–6, 232–3 Taiwan business regulation 196 economic officials 244 education and growth 180 government direction 136 indicative planning 205 protectionism 69, 70 Tanzania 116 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) 8 tax havens 258 technological revolution 31–2, 38–40 telegraph 37–8 Telenor 164 Thatcher, Margaret 50, 225–6, 261 Time-Warner group 132–3 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 180, 183 Toledo, Alejandro 219 Toyota and apartheid 214 production system 47 public money bail-out 80 trade restrictions 4 transnational corporations historical debts 80 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 nationality of capital 74–5, 76–7 production movement 79, 81–2 see also corporate sector Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 180, 183 trickle-down economics 137–8 and upward distribution of income 144–7 Trotsky, Leon 138 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 8 2008 financial crisis xiii, 144, 155–6, 171–2, 197–8, 233–4, 236, , 238–9, 245–7, 249, 254 Uganda 115–16 uncertainty 174–5 unemployment 218–19 United Kingdom CEO remuneration 153, 155–6 financial deregulation 235–6, 237 NHS 261 shipbuilders 219 see also Britain United Nations 162 United States economic model 104 Federal Reserve Board 171, 172, 246 financial deregulation 235–8 immigrant expectations 103–4 income inequality 144 inequalities 107–11 protectionism and growth 64–8, 69 R&D funding 206 standard of living 102–11 steel workers 219 welfare state and growth 228–30 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 136 university education effect 185–8 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) 200 upward redistribution of income 143–4 and trickle-down economics 144–7 Uruguay growth 73 income inequality 144 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 136 vacuum cleaners 34 Venezuela 144 Versailles Treaty 52 Vietnam 203–4 Volkswagen government share ownership 21 public money bail-out 80 wage gaps political determination 23–8 and protectionism 23–6, 67 wage legislation 5 Wagoner, Rick 45 Wall Street Journal 68, 83 Walpole, Robert 69–70 washing machines 31–2, 34–6 Washington, George 65, 66–7 Welch, Jack 17, 22, 45 welfare economics 250 welfare states 59, 110–43, 146–7, 215, 220, 221–30 and growth 228–30 Wilson, Charlie 192, 193 Windows Vista system 135 woollen manufacturing industry 70 work to rule 46–7 working hours 2, 7, 109–10 World Bank and free market 262 and free trade 72 and POSCO 126–8 government intervention 42, 44, 66 macro-economic stability 56 SAPs 118 WTO (World Trade Organization) 66, 262 Yes, Minister/Prime Minister (comedy series) 44 Yunus, Muhammad 161–2 Zimbabwe, hyperinflation 53–4


pages: 241 words: 83,523

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier by Michael Peel

banking crisis, blood diamond, British Empire, colonial rule, energy security, Golden arches theory, informal economy, Kickstarter, megacity, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, trade route, UNCLOS, wage slave

Alamieyeseigha came festooned with what antimoney-laundering specialists call ‘red flags’. One was that he was holding foreign bank accounts as governor even though Nigerian law did not allow him to do so. Another was that many of his assets were held through offshore companies based in secretive tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles and the Bahamas. A third was that – according to a declaration made when he took office in May 1999 – he had assets totalling $575,000 and an annual gubernatorial salary of just $12,000 a year. The numbers just didn’t add up: the London UBS accounts alone, for example, had a balance of more than $2.3m by December 2005.

In his final judgement, Mr Justice Rix said Mohammed Abacha and Bagudu were ‘unreliable’ witnesses, adding that Abacha was ‘dishonest’ and Bagudu ‘capable of dishonesty’. Few people outside the Abacha family would dispute Monfrini’s claim that there should be still more money to come back to Nigeria. By 2009, he had identified further targets amounting to more than $1bn, much of it in tax havens. He had decided to focus on $300m in Jersey, $300m in Liechtenstein, $350m in Luxembourg and $60m in the Bahamas. Then there are funds that have yet to be tracked down, because they are held in cash or are sitting unnoticed in accounts fronted by friends of the regime. More than a decade after he was hired to investigate the Abacha case, Monfrini was still pursuing legal action in Austria, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, France, Germany, Kenya and the USA.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Australia 11. India 12. Austria 12. Canada Speaking purely for myself, quite a few places high on the left-hand list are places I have no desire to live, which probably reflects the fact that the per capita GDP figures are skewed towards small countries that either are rich in resources or are tax havens. Gini coefficient A numeric technique for measuring a society’s inequality. It’s used to measure income inequality in particular. A Gini coefficient of 0 would mean perfect equality, in which everyone had the same income; a Gini coefficient of 1 would be perfect inequality, in which one person had all the money and everybody else had nothing.

Big companies already cut banks out of the process of borrowing, by raising money through issuing their own bonds. P2P offers a glimpse of a world in which this process has been democratized: people have realized how the system works and are beginning to cut banks out of the picture. paradis fiscal The wonderful French term for tax haven—I love the idea that a tax-free location is a form of paradise, in which people spend all their time cavorting on yachts. petrodollar Money made by selling oil; these transactions are denominated in US dollars because the USA made a deal with Saudi Arabia, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971, as a way of maintaining demand for the US dollar as the de facto global reserve currency.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The City reclaimed ancient privileges to restore its nineteenth-century position as an international financial centre, although this was now built upon proprietary trading in financial derivatives and securitisation. This was the purposeful, positive use of power to achieve a feasible aim – a dominant City of London. Light-touch regulation became as important a mantra to the City as free collective bargaining had been to the unions. Equally, the freedom to exploit tax havens and relieve foreign nationals from their tax obligations was as pivotal to City power as the unions’ insistence on legal immunity from damages in industrial disputes had been to theirs. Just as the unions portrayed themselves as essential to the construction of a Britain in which working-class interests would be enshrined, so the City portrayed itself as essential to a post-industrial Britain in which financial services would be in the vanguard of national wealth generation.

All had to refinance their entire balance sheets every few months – a giant exercise in maintaining investor confidence. Their New York and London offices had become interdependent arms operating a financial axis that, for all practical purposes, was one market, with London permitting lightly regulated trading in derivatives and a network of tax havens that was second to none. The fatal flaw in the model was not that the volumes of credit, securities and traded credit derivatives were worth many times the world’s GDP; it was that less and less capital was being deployed to support the staggering size of the banks’ balance sheets. Andrew Haldane, executive director of the Bank of England, and Piergiorgio Alessandri calculate that incredibly the capital ratios of British and American banks declined by five times from 1980 to 2005.

Edward, 266 Stephenson, George, 126, 127 Stiglitz, Joe, 51, 168–9, 367–8, 371 Strategy Unit, 337 structured investment vehicles, 151, 165, 169, 171, 188, 207, 209 Stutzer, Alois, 86 sub-prime mortgages, 64, 161, 203 Sugar, Alan, 64–5, 67 Summers, Larry, 92, 183 the Sun, 318, 327 Sunday Express, 321 Sunday Times, 318 supermarkets, relentless spread of, 389 Sure Start scheme, 10, 278, 307 Sutton Trust, 273, 293 swaps, 164; credit default swaps, 151, 152, 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 176, 191, 203, 207 Switzerland, 7, 86, 138, 180 takeovers and mergers, 8, 21, 33, 92, 245, 250, 258, 259, 388 Taliban, 102 Tax Justice network, 296 taxation: American right’s attitude to, 235, 297; capital transfer taxes, 73–4; collapse of tax base, 224, 368; concessions for private equity, 245, 247, 249, 374; Conservative reforms (1979-97), 275–6; corporation tax, 245; as deterrent to innovation, 104, 105; due desert and, 40, 220, 234, 235, 266; foreign nationals and, 32; housing wealth levy proposal, 373–4; inheritance tax, 73–4, 75, 78, 302–4, 393; low rates of, 5, 19, 387; luck and, 73–4, 75, 78, 303; one-off tax on bank bonuses, 26, 179, 249; progressive/redistributive, 78, 79, 80, 303, 387; proposed reforms, 209–10, 372, 373–4; relief on childcare vouchers, 277; tax avoidance, 25, 29, 42, 145, 151, 193, 245, 295–7; tax credits, 142, 277, 278, 336; tax evasion, 42, 145, 295–7; tax havens, 32, 295; tax relief on debt interest, 209–10, 374 teachers, 306, 307, 308 Technology Foresight, 21 Technology Strategy Board, 21 telecommunications, 133–4, 143 Terra Firma (private-equity firm), 28, 178, 247–8 terrorism, 36 Tesco, 246, 295 Tett, Gillian, 195 Thailand, 168 Thaler, Richard, 94–5 Thatcher, Margaret, 32, 81, 135, 144, 275, 290, 334, 388; centralisation of power, 14, 313; Rupert Murdoch and, 318 Thompson (wire service), 331 ‘3i’, 250, 252 Tilly, Charles, 24, 27, 272 The Times, 288, 295, 318, 319, 327, 330, 349 Times Higher Education, 21 Toulmin, Tim, 325, 332 Tourre, Fabrice, 103, 167–8 Toyota, 91, 269 trade unions, 88, 91, 142, 161, 179, 275, 364, 387; decline of, 272, 291–2, 341, 365–6; print and journalism, 320, 332; undue influence of, 31–2, 33, 364 Train to Gain, 306 Transport for London, 336 Treasury, 92, 178, 208, 214, 215, 218, 335, 336, 337, 369 Treasury and Civil Service Committee, 340 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 175, 176 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, 24 Turkish oligarchs, 30 Turnbull, Lord, 334 Turner, Lord Adair, 24, 179 Tyler, Tom, 87 UBS, 170, 178 UK Trade and Industry (UKTI), 230–1 Ulpian (Roman jurist), 45 Unipart, 93 United Nations, 68, 332–3, 384 United States: American colonists, 54, 121, 126; annual consumption levels, 375; anti-statism and, 234, 311; banking system, 138, 150–2, 156, 158–9, 160, 162–3, 167–9, 173–6, 181, 191–2, 195–6, 244; big finance’s penetration of the state, 176–8, 183; United States – continued economic conflict with China, 376–7, 378–80, 381, 382, 383; economic history of, 108, 131–4, 300; executive pay in, 67, 101, 172–4; financial crisis/collapse and, 152, 158–9, 181, 192, 358–9, 375; free market policies/theory in, 140, 145, 160, 163, 165, 184, 234–5; Great Depression, 159, 162, 205, 362; ‘growth triangle’ in South Carolina, 254; impact of small firms, 253, 255, 256; international order and, 226, 378–9, 385–6; LTCM crisis, 169–70, 183, 193, 200–1; money market funds in, 156, 158, 161; neo-conservatism and, 17–18, 144, 297; as non-saver, 36; relationship finance in, 244; savings and loans crisis, 161–2, 163–4; short termism of markets, 241; TARP, 175, 176; ‘tea-party’ conservatism, 234, 327, 386; universal male suffrage, 128; universities, 101, 262–3, 264, 308; volatility of economy, 297; welfare and, 80, 281, 283, 297 universities, 21, 252, 261–5, 295, 308, 355, 370, 372; private schools and, 293–4, 306; uncapping of fees proposal, 264–5, 371 Vadera, Shriti, 178 Value Added Tax (VAT), 366–7, 370, 372 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 133 Venetian empire, 121 venture capitalists, 241, 244–9, 250 Vishny, Robert, 62, 63 Vodafone, 255 Volcker, Paul, 206 voting system: alternative vote system (AV), 345–6; as delivering right-of-centre bias, 343; first-past-the-post system, 97–8, 217, 312, 313, 341, 343, 347; need for reform of, 97–8, 344–6, 347, 391; proportional representation, 97, 98, 344–6, 347, 391 Wales, devolving of power to, 15 Wall Street Journal, 349 Wallis, John Joseph, 113, 116, 129–30 Walpole, Robert, 125, 166 ‘war on terror’, 17, 144 Wars of the Roses, 124 Washington consensus, 163 Washington Post, 183 Watson, David Pitt, 242 Watson, Thomas, 29 Watt, James, 110, 126 ‘weapons of the weak’, 114–15 Weatherstone, Dennis (CEO of JP Morgan), 191–2 Webster, David, 292 Wedgwood, Josiah, 126–7 Weingast, Barry, 113, 116, 129–30 Welch, Jack, 216 welfare/social provision, 34, 80–2, 83–4, 281, 283–5, 297, 335; see also social security benefits; asset based, 298, 301–3, 304; coalition policy on, 343; undermining of popular support for, 80, 281–2, 283, 297, 302–3; universal services, 34, 79, 277, 281 welfare-to-work programmes, 278 Wenger, Arsène, 352 Westminster, Duke of, 64, 65 White, William, 182, 185 Willetts, David, The Pinch, 372 Williams, Rowan (Archbishop of Canterbury), 4, 26 Wilson, Harold, 312 Wilson, Woodrow, 132–3 Wilson Committee into City (1980), 179 Wilthagen, Tom, 299–301 Winstanley College, Wigan, 294 Winston, Robert, 107 wire agencies, 322, 331 Woessmann, Ludger, 305–6 Work Foundation, 94, 233 World Bank, 164, 182, 226, 383, 384 xenophobia, 16, 36 X-Factor, 282, 314 York University, Neuroimaging Centre (YNiC), 263 Young, Michael, 283–4 Young, Toby, 282 Yu Yongding, 381 Zilibotti, Fabrizio, 115–16 Zinoviev letter, 315


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Its immediate parent company is Press Acquisitions Ltd, incorporated in the UK, which the directors regard as being ultimately controlled by the twins’ family settlements. Press Acquisitions’ immediate parent company is May Corporation Ltd, incorporated in Jersey, a tax haven. But nothing is quite that simple. In February 2015, the Guardian reported that it had emerged that the group was ultimately owned, via a series of companies, by another company based in Bermuda, a leading tax haven. All 150 million shares in May Corporation are held by another Jersey-based company called Press Holdings Limited. All 267 million shares in Press Holdings are held by a company called B.UK Limited, based in Hamilton, Bermuda

Our readers regard the press in general with distaste and even if they read the Mail or News of the World, they feel secretly rather ashamed of doing so. We are trying to ensure they never feel ashamed of themselves . . . this is an honourable newspaper.’2 But as Conrad Black – in turn – stumbled, ownership of the Telegraph passed in 2004 to the Barclay brothers, a pair of reclusive identical twins who split their lives between the tax haven of Monaco and an island in the middle of the English channel on which, having imported a reported 1,000 workers, they built their own mock-gothic castle. The twins had dabbled in newspapers previously, buying the ill-fated European news-paper from Robert Maxwell in 1992 and the Scotsman in 1995.


pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

Most of this charitable giving was administered by the Sackler Trust, based in London, and the heirs of Raymond and Mortimer benefited from a series of other trusts in which the proceeds from OxyContin—those regular disbursements of hundreds of millions of dollars—were kept. Since its release nearly two decades earlier, OxyContin had generated some $35 billion. A sizable amount of this revenue was channeled not through London or New York but through the tax haven of Bermuda, where, for decades, an anonymous-looking modern office building on a narrow street lined with palm trees had served as a clearinghouse for the family’s wealth. The building was known as Mundipharma House. By routing money through Bermuda, the Sacklers had avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, according to one former financial adviser to the family.

This was the premise of New York’s lawsuit against the Sacklers—that the family had looted its own company—and even as the bankruptcy proceeding played out, Letitia James wanted to gather more detailed information on their finances. The Sackler fortune was dispersed in a vast global web of hundreds of shell companies and trusts and LLCs, many of them established in tax havens and jurisdictions with powerful bank secrecy laws. The structure of their financial arrangements could seem deliberately obscure, with an infinity of anonymous corporate entities, all nested like Matryoshka dolls. In August, Letitia James had subpoenaed records from thirty-three financial institutions and investment advisers that had ties to the family.

She was pursuing a legal theory of “fraudulent conveyance,” arguing that the family had deliberately hidden money in order to evade potential creditors. The subpoenas went to big institutions like Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC but also to smaller holding companies that were linked to the family and registered in offshore tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and the isle of Jersey. The Sacklers fought the subpoenas, suggesting that they amounted to a form of “harassment.” A spokesman for Mortimer released a statement blasting the gambit as “a cynical attempt by a hostile A.G.’s office to generate defamatory headlines.”


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Land is also fixed within politically, not economically, defined jurisdictions. These boundaries are easily crossed by capital – capital is mobile and it migrates. If you are a multinational company and wish to avoid high corporation tax in France, you can easily move your production operations to a tax haven in the Caribbean. But if you need excellent transport networks or to be close to particular producers of complementary goods, or to have easy access to a supply of highly skilled French-speaking staff, or to operate in a certain time zone to give traders access to markets, you may think twice. These phenomena are fixed in space – they are ‘land’.

Property taxes that include the value of buildings on land are less efficient, since they are, in effect, a tax on the investment in that property. Even so, they are less likely to affect people’s behaviour than income or employment taxes. Additionally, since land cannot be hidden or moved to a tax haven, land value taxation is difficult to avoid or evade – which contrasts well with many other forms of tax in a globalised world, in particular corporation taxes. Empirical studies support the theory, finding that taxes on immoveable property are the least damaging to economic growth, with income and corporation taxes the most damaging (Arnold, 2008; Arnold et al., 2011).


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

It has been estimated conservatively that corporations and individuals now escape their legal obligation to pay taxes globally to the amount of $500 billion a year through a variety of tax havens, tax loopholes and tax evasion schemes.6 One way to strengthen the public sector and increase the transparency of corporations would be to find ways to reduce corporate tax evasion through increased corporate transparency. At minimum this would require the end of tax havens, numbered bank accounts and shell corporations, as well as exposing all financial transactions to public accountability. Admittedly, this would not be easy to achieve, for any effective control of corporate tax evasion would require a great deal more international cooperation than now exists.


pages: 282 words: 89,266

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

Then, during the cheeses, Whittingdale hastily assembled an independent panel of openly corrupt newspaper barons, murderous highwaymen and low-life business vermin to farm out all BBC death and horror sound effects in future to competitive independent service providers and Conservative Party donors based in offshore tax havens, forcibly bound by an inflexible “no fennel” pledge. As the Spotify revelations unspooled, I realised my own cultural currency was in danger. Although my main income stream remains live stand-up, I now exploit a number of secondary finance rivulets, unsentimentally fracking my assiduously cultivated record collection in the hope of transforming the intangible flatus of taste into the black gold of financial remuneration.

If a company subcontracted to provide NHS care is technically legal, then it is unfair, under the free-market ethic of competition, to discriminate against them. Soon it won’t even be possible to die ethically, let alone buy breakfast cereal. Clinical commissioning groups in Bristol and Hackney, where I live, are to suspend their objections to using care services provided by companies registered in tax havens. But I haven’t spent my whole life not eating Shreddies and stealing Starbucks chocolate only to be taken fatally ill and see public money paid to a care provider overseeing my expiry while not contributing any of its profits back into the public purse. Twelve years ago, I collapsed backstage at the Soho theatre after a long-standing stomach disorder finally turned critical, vomiting and discharging blood from my bottom.


pages: 74 words: 19,580

The 99.998271% by Simon Wood

banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, equal pay for equal work, Julian Assange, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Steve Jobs, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

We also have big manufacturers who have used their power and influence over politicians to push through trade agreements which reduce product safety standards and allow them to outsource jobs. Oil companies do the same to block environmental protection laws. Britain has been described as the world’s first onshore tax haven, with the UK’s billionaires 18 paying only 14.7 million pounds income tax on their combined 126 billion pounds in 2006/7. More recent data is unavailable as corporations, banks and the wealthy tend not to be forthcoming with details of their finances. And let us not forget lobbying, which is the attempt, often by individuals, corporations or advocacy groups, to influence government policy and decision-making.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Consider the following list, by no means complete: • A “low-rate” financial transaction tax—which would hit trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments—could bring in nearly $650 billion at the global level each year, according to a 2011 resolution of the European Parliament (and it would have the added bonus of slowing down financial speculation).49 • Closing tax havens would yield another windfall. The U.K.-based Tax Justice Network estimates that in 2010, the private financial wealth of individuals stowed unreported in tax havens around the globe was somewhere between $21 trillion and $32 trillion. If that money were brought into the light and its earnings taxed at a 30 percent rate, it would yield at least $190 billion in income tax revenue each year.50 • A 1 percent “billionaire’s tax,” floated by the U.N., could raise $46 billion annually.51 • Slashing the military budgets of each of the top ten military spenders by 25 percent could free up another $325 billion, using 2012 numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Pacala, “Equitable Solutions to Greenhouse Warming: On the Distribution of Wealth, Emissions and Responsibility Within and Between Nations,” presentation to International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, November 2007, p. 3. 49. “Innovative Financing at a Global and European Level,” European Parliament, resolution, March 8, 2011, http://www.europarl.europa.eu. 50. “Revealed: Global Super-Rich Has at Least $21 Trillion Hidden in Secret Tax Havens,” Tax Justice Network, press release, July 22, 2012. 51. “World Economic and Social Survey 2012: In Search of New Development Finance,” United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2012, p. 44. 52. Sam Perlo-Freeman, et. al., “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2012,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, April 2013 http://sipri.org. 53.

., 153, 201 storm barriers, 108, 109 Strahl, Chuck, 362 stranded assets, 146 StratoShield, 262, 268n, 271 stratosphere, sulfur dioxide in: from volcanic eruptions, 258–59, 273–74 see also Pinatubo Option strontium-90, 203 structural inequity, 40 Stuffed and Starved (Patel), 135 Stutz, John, 94 Suckling, Kierán, 206 Sudan, 270 sulfur dioxide emissions, 208 Suncor Energy, 234, 246 sunlight, reflection of, see Solar Radiation Management SuperFreakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), 262–63, 271–72 Superfund Act of 1980, 202 super-rich, 19 supply lines, length of, 76 Supreme Court, Canada: Haida Nation case in, 369 Indigenous land rights affirmed by, 368, 371–72 sustainability, 55, 77, 447 Sustainable Energy Blueprint, 213 Swarthmore College, 355 Swearengin, Paula, 310 Sweden, 179 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 34 Swiss Re Americas, 49 SWN Resources, 299 Sydney, Australia, 446 Syngenta, 9 Syriza party (Greek), 181–82, 297 Take, The, 123 Tambococha oil field, 410 tarmac, melting of, 1–2 Tar Sands Blockade, 302 tar sands oil (bitumen), 2, 94, 139, 140, 144, 145, 234, 237, 252–53, 254, 310, 349, 352, 358, 446 call for global moratorium on, 353 diluted (dilbit), 325, 331 grassroots opposition to, 321–22 high risk in, 324 Indigenous opposition to, 322, 375 open-pit extraction of, 329 opposition to, 234 water use in mining of, 346 see also Alberta tar sands; pipelines tax cuts, 39, 72 for consumers, 112 taxes, 19, 39, 42, 117, 119 airline, 250–51 carbon, 112, 114, 125, 157, 218, 250, 400, 461 corporate, 19, 115 financial transaction, 114 luxury, 93 pollution-based, 284 on the rich, 113–14, 118, 153 transition, 418 tax havens, closure of, 114 Tax Justice Network, 114 tax refunds, 118 Tea Party, 3, 38, 227 technology, 16, 24, 76, 142, 186, 236 and domination of nature, 56–57 extreme extraction and, 310 see also geoengineering TED Talks, 211, 236 Tellus Institute, 94 temperatures, extreme, 2 Temple, William, 183 Tercek, Mark, 208n TerraPower, 264 Texaco, 309 Texas: drought of 2011 in, 47, 440 fracking in, 347 Keystone XL and, 361 water pollution in, 329 Texas, University of, 329 Texas City Prairie Preserve, oil and gas drilling on, 192–95, 196, 215 Thames River, 446 Thatcher, Margaret, 39, 42, 60 Thie, Hans, 131 think tanks, conservative, 38, 203 Third World Network, 77 Thomas-Flurer, Geraldine, 367 Thompson, Lonnie G., 15 Thoreau, Henry David, 184, 286 350.org, 140, 156, 233n, 353, 356 tidal power, 127 Tiger Management, 208 tight-rock formations, 311; see also shale, fracking of Tillerson, Rex, 111, 314 Time magazine, Planet Earth on cover of, 74, 204 Tiputini oil field, 410 Tjelmeland, Aaron, 192, 195 Tongue River, 389, 390 Tongue River Railroad (proposed), 389 tornados, 406 Toronto, 55, 65, 67, 73, 126 Total, 246 Totnes, England, 364 Toyota, 196 trade, see free trade agreements; international trade trade unions, 81, 83, 177, 204, 454 job creation and, 126–27 job protection by, 126, 178 NAFTA opposed by, 84 transaction tax, 418 TransCanada, 149, 346, 359, 361, 362 see also Keystone XL pipeline Transition Town movement, 364 Transocean, 330 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 78 transportation infrastructure, 85, 90, 127 travel, wealth and, 113 Treaty 6, 372 tree farms, 222 Trenberth, Kevin, 272, 275 Trent River, 300 trickle-down economics, 19 Trinity nuclear test, 277 triumphalism, 205, 465 Tropic of Chaos (Parenti), 49 tropics, techno-fixes and risk to, 49 Trump, Donald, 3 Tschakert, Petra, 269 Tsilhqot’in First Nation, 345 Tsipras, Alexis, 181–82, 466 Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, 323 Tutu, Desmond, 464 Tuvalu, 13 2 degrees Celsius boundary, 87–88, 89, 150, 354, 456 Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 13, 21, 56, 86–87, 214, 283 typhoons, 107, 175, 406, 465 Uganda, 222 ultra-deepwater “subsalt” drilling, 145 Undesirables (Isaacs), 167 unemployment, 180 unemployment insurance, 454 Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán, 222 Union of Concerned Scientists, 201 Clean Vehicles Program at, 237 United Kingdom, 13, 149, 170, 224, 225 compensation of slave-owners in, 415–16, 457 “dash for cash” in, 299 divestment movement in, 354 flooding in, 7, 54, 106–7 fracking in, 299–300, 313 Industrial Revolution in, 172–73, 410 negatives of privatization in, 128 politics of climate change in, 36, 150 supports for renewable energy cut in, 110 Thatcher government of, 39 World War II rationing in, 115–16 United Nations, 7, 18, 64, 87, 114 Bloomberg as special envoy for cities and climate change of, 236 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), 219–20, 224, 226 climate governance and, 280 climate summits of, 5, 11, 65, 150, 165, 200; see also specific summits Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 110 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) international agreements and, 17 Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, 135 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment of 1972, 202 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 377, 383 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 180 United Nations Environmental Modification Convention, 278 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 272 United Nations Framework on Climate Change, 200, 410 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 76, 77, 78–79 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 167 United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (1992), 55, 293 United Policyholders, 109 United States, 19, 67, 68, 143 carbon emissions from, 409 coal exports from, 320, 322, 346, 349, 374, 376 Copenhagen agreement signed by, 12, 150 energy privatization reversals in, 98 environmental legislation in, 201–2 failure of climate legislation in, 226–27 Kyoto Protocol and, 218–19, 225–26 oil and gas export restrictions in, 71 opposition movement in, 9 solar energy market in, 72 WTO challenges brought against, 65 WTO challenges brought by, 64–65, 68 United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), 226–28 University College London, 415–16 uranium, 176 urban planning, green, 16 urban sprawl, 90, 91 US Airways, 1–2 U.S.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The idea that we are too broke to afford to save our one and only home is simply untrue. The money needed for this transition is out there, we just need governments to have the courage to go after it – to cut and redirect fossil fuel subsidies, to increase taxes on the rich, to reduce spending on policing, prisons and wars, and to close down tax havens. This principle of a just transition is known as polluter pays and it’s based on a simple idea: the people and institutions that have profited most from pollution should pay the most to repair the harm it has done. This principle includes not just corporations and wealthy individuals but also the nations of the Global North: we have been putting carbon into the atmosphere for a couple of hundred years, and we did the most to create this crisis, while many of the nations that are most vulnerable to its effects contributed the least.

Such ‘divest–invest’ strategies would use activism to drive funds out of fossil fuels and other polluting industries and into projects that promote the public good: cash would flow to Black and Indigenous households and communities, to publicly owned renewable energy generation and storage, to rural broadband and urban community orchard projects. We can do this with a planetary scope in mind, pairing this tactic with pressure on the trillions of dollars’ worth of wealth hoarded in tax havens across the globe. But we should not fall into the trap of being overly focused on redistributing money within the same political and economic system. True world-making calls for us to rebuild the system itself, and not just the attempt to compensate for its unequal allocation of resources. That means redistributing power directly by challenging how political decisions are made in the first place.

See also forests U Uganda, 273, 357, 398 UK: carbon dioxide emissions from territorial and consumption-based accounting perspectives 258; climate leadership claim, 27, 156; Climate Change Committee, 306; cumulative carbon dioxide emissions per capita (1850–2020) 155; economy and lowering of territorial carbon dioxide emissions, 306; insect declines and, 110; keystone species in, 349; media in, 369; nuclear power in, 229; pork and beef consumption in, 250; Royal Society in, 30; Selby Drax power plant carbon dioxide emissions, 92; transport carbon dioxide emissions and, 267, 272, 273, 274; vulnerability to impacts of climate change, 159–60; waste in, 297–9 Ukraine, Russian invasion of (2022), 356 Unilever, 295, 297 uninhabitable areas, 166, 167, 170, 192 United Nations (UN), 25, 218; biodiversity, report on declining (2019), 417; ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ to decarbonize principle, 257; Convention on Biological Diversity, 234; Copenhagen climate summit (2009) 28, 337; Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 418; Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro (1992), 20, 26, 204, 206, 240; Emissions Gap report, 301; Environment Programme (UNEP) Agenda 21, 90; fishing subsidies and, 345; Framework Convention on Climate Change, 26, 28, 306; Green Climate Fund, 412; High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 187; IPCC and see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); Kyoto Protocol (1997), 27, 28, 92, 156, 269; nationally determined contributions (NDC), 308–9; New York climate summit (2018), 354; New York declaration (2014), 90; Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 187; Paris Agreement and see Paris Agreement; poll on perceptions of climate change as a global emergency, 405; Sustainable Development Goals, 90, 135; World Food Programme (WFP), 168 universal basic income, 412 universal basic services, 333, 334 uranium mining, 229, 413 urbanization/urban population, 135, 137, 139, 146, 291, 292, 341 United States of America: aerosol emissions in, 58; African Americans, 163, 164, 412; American Clean Energy and Security Act (2009), 30; Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities, 163; car use in, 220–21; carbon dioxide emissions fall in, 224; carbon dioxide emissions from territorial and consumption-based accounting perspectives 258; carbon dioxide emission inequalities, 406, 407; cold spell, south-central states (2021), 25, 62, 65; Congress, 26–7, 306; consumerism, 281, 282, 284, 287; Covid stimulus, 381, 382–3; cumulative carbon dioxide emissions per capita (1850–2020) 155; deforestation, 14; diets, 250, 342; drought, 62; electric vehicle use, 272; GDP per capita (2019) 184; Global South and, 163–4; health care carbon footprint, 334; heatwaves, 25, 50, 65; historical carbon dioxide emissions, 163–4; hurricanes see hurricanes; Kyoto Protocol and, 27; migration and, 167, 168; net zero emissions by 2050 target and, 21; oil production, 93, 217; Paris Agreement and, 28, 141; per capita carbon dioxide emissions, 4; pesticide use, 111; plastic waste, 295–6, 298; recycling, 295–6; sacrifice zones, 163, 416; Senate, 25, 382; Swedish emigration to, 387–8; temperate forests, 103, 104, 105, 105; UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and, 26–7; universal basic income concept and, 412; violent personal crime 190; wildfires, 98, 130–31, 133, 378 V Vector-borne disease, 134, 143–6, 183 vested interests, 221, 234, 367 violent conflicts, 88–9 volatile organic compounds, 53, 55 volcanoes, 6–7, 8, 313, 314 voluntary carbon offsetting, 269–70 voting, 20, 284, 326, 364, 374, 420, 424 W Walking, 135, 273 Warren, Dorian, 412 Warehouse to Bowl, transforming worldview from, 419 waste: agricultural, 99, 140; food, 244, 247, 251, 252, 253, 255; management, 87, 155, 281, 290–300, 363, 414; plastic see plastic; projected total waste generation by region (2020–50) 293; projected waste generation per capita (2020–50) by income 292; recycling and see recycling water: conflicts over, 88–9; food production and, 248, 249, 249, 252, 342, 343; hydropower, 228; peak, 89; quality, 10, 96, 148, 155, 246, 340, 341, 392; scarcity, 3, 52, 73, 134, 167, 170, 171, 172, 186–7, 248, 407–8; use, 13, 32, 35, 88–9, 247; vapour, 24, 67, 75 wealth: climate change effects and inequalities in, 182–5, 184; climate change linked to inequalities in, 42, 132, 138, 182–5, 184, 316, 358, 389, 398; climate reparations and inequalities in, 410–14, 429; consumerism and, 264, 282–3; Global North and Global South and see Global North and Global South; individual carbon rights and, 407–8; individual inequalities in and individual carbon dioxide emissions, 3, 4, 132, 154, 159, 161, 208, 282–3, 329–30, 331–2, 369, 393–4, 405–9, 408, 432; just transition and, 377, 390, 391, 395, 396; middle class, rise of global and, 282; national inequalities in and national carbon dioxide emissions, 154–5, 159, 206, 207, 304, 308–12, 358, 389, 393–4, 406, 412; redistribution of, 405–9; taxes on, 312, 393, 402, 409; tax havens and, 412, 424; transfer from north to south, 393; wealth group contribution to world emissions (2019) 406; World Inequality Database, 406; World Inequality Report (2022), 407. See also equity weather events. See individual name and type of event weathering, enhanced, 237 well to wheel emissions, 268 West African Monsoon Shift 38 West Antarctic Ice Sheet 38, 39 wetlands, 96, 236, 245, 253, 346, 416 wheat, 149, 250, 254, 342, 343 white supremacy, 162, 163, 391, 400 wildfires, 50, 51, 62, 96–8, 102–5, 104, 130–31, 133, 193, 218, 314, 378–9, 415, 432 Wilkes Basin East Antarctica 38 willow ptarmigan, 114 willow warbler, 113 wind patterns, 58, 81–2 wind power, 28, 174, 220, 222, 224–5, 225, 226, 227, 228, 268, 270, 280, 297, 343–6, 376, 388, 431; offshore, 220, 228, 343–4, 345, 346 wolves, 9, 103, 174, 349, 350 women, climate crisis and, 172, 176, 177, 309, 398–9, 402–4 wood fuel burning, 4, 92, 100, 102, 121, 156, 216, 224, 225, 226, 229, 233 woolly rhinoceroses, 9 World Bank, 167, 306, 376; Groundswell Report Part II, 187 World Economic Forum, Davos, 378 World Health Organization (WHO), 134, 135; Health Emergency Programme, 133; Special Report on Climate Change and Health, 136 Wounded Knee, US, 387 Y Yellow fever, 143 Yucatàn Peninsula, 417 Z Zika virus, 143, 145 zinc, 149, 150, 151 zombie fires, 379 zoonotic disease, 133 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Illustration Credits 1: ‘Global Average Temperature 1850–2020’ adapted for 2017–21 from ‘Changes over time of the global sea surface temperature as well as air temperature over land’ by Robert Rohde, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2020.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

A Christian Aid report documents cases of underpriced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528, and overpriced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5, 485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4, 896, and French wrenches at $1, 089.24 This is a classic problem with TNCs, but today the problem has become more severe because of the proliferation of tax havens that have no or minimal corporate income taxes.Companies can vastly reduce their tax obligations by shifting most of their profits to a paper company registered in a tax haven. It may be argued that the host country should not complain about transfer pricing, because, without the foreign direct investment in question, the taxable income would not have been generated in the first place.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

A Christian Aid report documents cases of underpriced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528, and overpriced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896, and French wrenches at $1,089.24 This is a classic problem with TNCs, but today the problem has become more severe because of the proliferation of tax havens that have no or minimal corporate income taxes. Companies can vastly reduce their tax obligations by shifting most of their profits to a paper company registered in a tax haven. It may be argued that the host country should not complain about transfer pricing, because, without the foreign direct investment in question, the taxable income would not have been generated in the first place.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

They shift revenue from one Irish subsidiary to a Dutch company with no employees, and then on to a Bermuda mailbox owned by another Ireland-registered company.19 It is a farce, and it is all perfectly legal. The ultimate loss from unpaid taxes is an estimated 60 billion euros a year for the weakest members of the European Union.20 While individuals and small businesses pay high levels of taxes, the share of corporate profits that multinationals have reported in tax havens has increased tenfold since the 1980s; much of this is coming from the large tech companies.21 The tech giants increase income inequality, because the losers are the people and small businesses who do pay taxes and the winners are the shareholders of the companies that use them to dodge taxes.22 The tech giants preach social solidarity and not being evil (Google recently decided to drop their motto “Don't be evil,” as it seemed out of fashion), while they funnel billions into offshore havens and channel their European operations through tax-friendly Ireland.

Chapter 5: Silicon Valley Throws Some Shade 1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/01/google_eu_investigation_comment/. 2. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm. 3. https://www.wired.com/story/yelp-claims-google-broke-promise-to-antitrust-regulators/. 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html. 5. http://theweek.com/articles/693488/google-monopoly--crushing-internet. 6. https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com. 7. https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os. 8. https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx. 9. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-swayed-efforts-to-block-annoying-online-ads-1518623663. 10. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-facebook-can-we-be-saved-social-media-giant-w518655. 11. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevendennis/2017/06/19/should-we-care-whether-amazon-is-systematically-destroying-retail/#62085ff66b1f. 12. https://www.axios.com/regulators-ftc-facebook-google-doj-advertising-5ea0f001-eca8-4f07-b7d0-6ed22782800f.html. 13. https://lpeblog.org/2017/12/06/from-territorial-to-functional-sovereignty-the-case-of-amazon/. 14. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450476/silicon-valleys-anti-conservative-bias-solution-treat-major-tech-companies-utilities. 15. https://www.wired.com/story/heres-what-facebook-wont-let-you-post/. 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html. 17. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/21/facebook-should-stop-cooperating-with-russian-government-censorship/. 18. http://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2017_Fall_Pasquale.php. 19. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-02/google-s-dutch-sandwich-shielded-16-billion-euros-from-tax. 20. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/05/17/the-google-tax/. 21. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/corporate-tax-avoidance/478293/. 22. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/08/tax-havens-dodging-theft-multinationals-avoiding-tax. 23. https://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/conferences/2008/09/msvdoj/smith. 24. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-google.html. 25. https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-antitrust-lawsuit-netscape-internet-explorer-20-years. 26. https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274. 27. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/. 28. https://www.recode.net/2018/1/23/16919424/apple-amazon-facebook-google-uber-trump-white-house-lobbying-immigration-russia. 29. http://www.stateofdigital.com/eric-schmidt-at-google-hearings-close-to-monopoly-but-weve-not-cooked-anything/. 30. https://laweconcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/manne-the_real_reaon_foundem_foundered_2018-05-02-1.pdf. 31. https://www.salon.com/2015/11/24/googles_insidious_shadow_lobbying_how_the_internet_giant_is_bankrolling_friendly_academics_and_skirting_federal_investigations/. 32. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html. 33. https://qz.com/1206184/bill-gates-warns-silicon-valley-not-to-be-the-new-microsoft/. 34. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor. 35. http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/39740/39740_14996_3.pdf. 36. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/who-owns-the-internet. 37. https://www.cjr.org/special_report/facebook-media-buzzfeed.php. 38. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/23/facebook-non-promoted-posts-news-feed-new-trial-publishers. 39. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/complete-list-facebooks-misreported-metrics-and-what-they-mean. 40. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/complete-list-facebooks-misreported-metrics-and-what-they-mean. 41. https://nypost.com/2016/11/03/facebook-sued-over-its-fraudulent-ad-metrics/. 42. https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/facebook-s-video-move-may-aid-nielsen-comscore-168497. 43. http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-75-billion-ad-swindle.html. 44. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/07/facebook-claims-it-can-reach-more-people-than-actually-exist-in-uk-us-and-other-countries. 45. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet. 46. https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html. 47. http://www.vulture.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy.html. 48. https://medium.com/humane-tech/tech-and-the-fake-market-tactic-8bd386e3d382. 49. https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html. 50. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-facebook-can-we-be-saved-social-media-giant-w518655. 51. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazon-may-have-a-counterfeit-problem/558482/. 52. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazon-may-have-a-counterfeit-problem/558482/. 53. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevendennis/2017/06/19/should-we-care-whether-amazon-is-systematically-destroying-retail/#62085ff66b1f. 54. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox. 55. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/23/amazon-marketplace-third-party-seller-faustian-pact. 56. https://www.forbes.com/sites/retailwire/2014/10/30/is-amazon-undercutting-third-party-sellers-using-their-own-data/#700a08a953d8. 57. https://www.propublica.org/article/amazon-says-it-puts-customers-first-but-its-pricing-algorithm-doesnt 58. https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0202.htm. 59. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB77/index1.html. 60. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236347/. 61. https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/7/11/15929014/end-of-the-internet-startup. 62.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

It was widely thought that Shaxson would rule against UP and that he would recommend a deep reformation of the tax system, including an elimination of reinvoicing, transfer pricing, and a general rollback of banking secrecy. Polls suggested that his recommendations would be favored by British citizens. Plenty of corporations and tax havens were deathly afraid of this outcome, especially the prime minister of Mauritius, who personally stood to lose billions. One way to derail this process was by killing Shaxson. Using an airburst meteor at his favorite holiday resort as a murder weapon may have been disproportionate and expensive, but previous death threats had resulted in Shaxson’s shielding by a powerful drone-based PPOI order (permanent protective overwatch and intervention).

It was only due to his lax data security measures that the CSIS investigators were able to get as far as they did. Unfortunately, his allies were not quite as foolish and remained hidden until much later. However, the sensational nature of the attack and the detailed accounts of how Torabully and his allies aimed to benefit from it rallied popular opinion against the interests of the tax havens. New “Shaxson regulations” were imposed, including all those that he would have recommended and more, marking the beginning of the Great Reclamation of the economy from its manipulators. 72    THE DOWNVOTED London, England, 2045 Excerpt from “The Downvoted” by Richard Cameron: Eric never tired of his movies.


pages: 112 words: 30,160

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

As we’ve seen, that’s likely to be most true in skill-intensive sectors, and especially in industries experimenting with new business models and technologies. As we’ve also seen, the gains to density are constrained when it’s difficult to capitalize on innovation through entrepreneurship. The world’s richest places tend to be dense, well educated, and free-market oriented (or tax havens or oil-rich) – think of New York and the Bay area, of Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands. Without a stock of skilled workers and a relatively open marketplace, density’s impact on growth and productivity will be limited. One might object that the US is one of the world’s least dense countries.


pages: 125 words: 35,820

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Constantine Buhayer

banking crisis, British Empire, business climate, centre right, COVID-19, financial independence, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, lockdown, low cost airline, offshore financial centre, open economy, Skype, women in the workforce, young professional

The country presents itself as an EU outpost, an investment hub, and a logistics center. Until the banking crisis of 2013 it had one of the fastest growing economies in Europe and the country thought it would become the Tiger Economy of the eastern Mediterranean. Then the financial crisis meant that the money its banks had received from being a tax haven, especially from the Russians, had been invested in huge shares of the Greek sovereign debt. When Greece was hit by a catastrophic debt crisis, Cyprus followed, and its massive debt was met largely by ordinary Cypriot depositors. Soon the banks diversified, and the country slowly started implementing reforms suggested by the EU and the World Bank.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

It’s a way to bypass other countries’ more expensive and less efficient systems. No more paperwork, lower taxes, and, if you own a business, all the freedom that comes with being an incorporated business in the EU. In a similar way to how other countries have created tax havens to benefit from large deposits in their banks, Estonia has established itself as an efficiency haven. Instead of facilitating criminal behavior as tax havens do, Estonia’s system is trying to make business more secure. The ideology behind it is rooted in good government. Among the benefits to Estonia is the additional tax revenue and more than $500 million in fees alone that it expects from 10 million e-residents over the next several years.


pages: 399 words: 107,932

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

This process appears to have had a second, less obvious purpose: to dig up as much dirt as possible on all participants, young and old. High-powered CEOs and politicians spilled about their extramarital affairs, the secret child they were still paying for, their not-quite-legal deals, their growing collection of offshore tax havens—and above all their fears of being caught and held accountable. Sarah Edmondson says coaches were instructed to take notes on the worst things new students were willing to share. Much like Scientology, the organization was collecting what Russians would call “kompromat” on students. This was used as leverage to encourage deeper participation, and in Daniela’s case, her undocumented status, her use of a fake ID provided by NXIVM to cross the border in 2004, and her admitted stealing were all brought up to encourage compliance.

PLEASE DON’T FORGET THIS AGAIN. XO.” * * * — DESPITE THE NEW layer of secrecy and the increasingly high price tag for surveillance, the information Keeffe and Salinas were getting seemed to be less and less credible. One set of search results claimed that Rick Ross had bank accounts in tax havens all over the Caribbean and Europe, but attempts to test activity in those accounts came back negative. “I feel the information they sent us now is not high impact and not very credible,” Salinas wrote. As one of Keeffe’s newest targets, Bouchey knew what was coming to some extent. She’d been present in the room when Keeffe and Raniere had discussed their investigations and legal cases.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

We pledge to keep a lid on executive pay so no executive is paid more than fifty times the median pay of American workers. We define “pay” to include salary, bonuses, health benefits, pension benefits, deferred salary, stock options, and every other form of compensation. We pledge to pay at least 30 percent of money earned in the United States in taxes to the United States. We won’t shift our money to offshore tax havens, and we won’t use accounting gimmicks to fake how much we earn. We pledge not to use our money to influence elections. This isn’t too much to ask, is it? Again, it wouldn’t be a legal requirement; corporations would be free to pledge or not to pledge. And consumers would be free to boycott those corporations that don’t make the pledge or that disregard it.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Today, we can do it ourselves, so trivially that we forget what a chore this used to be. The cost of creating legal entities is falling, driven by a very competitive US market. Europe still lags behind. Some smaller European countries such as Estonia and Macedonia are positioning themselves as the Delawares of Europe (not to be confused with tax havens like Cyprus, which have as their model secrecy and low taxes rather than simple efficiency). Government departments are increasingly using email instead of paper, and accepting tax returns and other reporting via the Internet through standardized formats. This reduces the need for accountants and other middlemen.

"That'll do nicely, sir." This was a cross-border specialty. For decades, Germans seeking to avoid the high taxes of their country could hop over the border to Austria, open an anonymous numbered account, and put undeclared cash income there. High taxes and old laws left Europe littered with convenient little tax havens: Andorra, Monaco, Luxembourg, Jersey, Malta, Liechtenstein. Even Belgium welcomed tax refugees from the Netherlands, as did Germany from Austria, and Switzerland from anywhere in the world and especially from corrupt foreign dictatorships. Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations ended such liberties.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

That means breaking up companies that wield coersive levels of power, like many of the technology giants. It means fostering competition in the many industries that are only weakly competitive. And it means taking on corporate tax evasion, including leveraging America’s soft power to prevent other countries from serving as tax havens for rich white American men and their companies. On an individual level, it means overhauling a tax system that indulges the wealthy. To level the playing field, America must close loopholes like the carried interest loophole, abolish the $1 trillion-per-year tax deductions program, implement robust inheritance taxes to combat the literal reinvention of aristocracy, and tax capital gains as ordinary income because, in a capitalist system, few things are more ordinary than growing one’s capital.

Buffett to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, March 1, 1996, https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1995.html. 12. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). 13. “Google Shifted $23 Billion to Tax Haven Bermuda in 2017: Filing,” Reuters, January 3, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-taxes-netherlands-idUSKCN1OX1G9. 14. Renu Zaretsky, “Corporate Taxes: Are They Fair? Who Really Pays Them, and When?,” Tax Policy Center, March 4, 2020, https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/corporate-taxes-are-they-fair-who-really-pays-them-and-when. 15.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

New Water-Based Locations for Trading Servers Could Enable Firms to Fully Optimise Their Trading Strategies,” Financial News, Sept. 17, 2012; Adam Piore, “Start-Up Nations on the High Seas,” Discover, Sept. 19, 2012; George Petrie and Jon White, “The Call of the Sea,” New Scientist, Sept. 22, 2012; Paul Peachey, “A Tax Haven on the High Seas That Could Soon Be Reality,” Independent, Dec. 27, 2013; Geoff Dembicki, “Worried About Earth? Hit the High Seas: What Seasteaders Reveal About Our Desire to Be Saved by Technology,” Tyee, March 1, 2014; Kyle Denuccio, “Silicon Valley Is Letting Go of Its Techie Island Fantasies,” Wired, May 16, 2015; Nicola Davison, “Life on the High Seas: How Ocean Cities Could Become Reality,” Financial Times, Sept. 3, 2015. In 1982, a group of Americans: Anthony Van Fossen, Tax Havens and Sovereignty in the Pacific Islands (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012).

It was a surreal and claustrophobic nook, like a library on a submarine. We exited the top of the north tower and crossed the platform to the south tower. Michael began telling me about Sealand’s most recent—and in many ways most audacious—plan: to host a server farm with sensitive data beyond the reach of snooping governments. The informational equivalent of a tax haven—and called HavenCo—the company, founded in 2000, offered web hosting for gambling, pyramid schemes, porn, subpoena-proof emails, and untraceable bank accounts. It turned away clients tied to spam, child porn, and corporate cyber sabotage. “We have our limits,” Michael said. (I refrained from asking him the question on my mind, which was why pyramid schemes were okay if spam was not.)


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

The US tax code illustrates Olson’s law perfectly: every exemption is helping somebody. One reason why Donald Trump is reluctant to reveal his tax returns is that, like most New York real estate developers, he seldom pays tax. The health-care industry has a labyrinth of deductions for health plans. For all the justified protests about offshore tax havens, America’s worst tax avoidance scam is at home, particularly in Delaware. Lobby groups cleverly mix greed and fear: you get some money if you support them, but if you don’t, your opponent will get a fortune in your party primary. The lobbyists’ most seductive gift is not an all-expenses-paid trip but a supply of briefing documents that help an overworked politician to stay on top of the news and cope with the tsunami of words that washes over their desks.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

This, too, was confirmed: I later learned that one of the recipients of this citizenship had been deported to Thailand for speaking out against the authorities. I tracked the man down in London, Ontario, where he’d sought refugee status. After spending his entire life as a stateless non-citizen of the Emirates, he, too, had become a global citizen—albeit an unwitting one. The “global citizens” who buy papers from Caribbean tax havens without setting foot in their adopted countries, and the disenfranchised residents of the Emirates who obtain Comorian citizenship with no plans to ever go there, represent two sides of a common phenomenon. They challenge any meaningful connection between man and state. Global citizenship is itself a new form of statelessness.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

This is an important distinction because it goes straight to the heart of current anxieties over tax, inequality, and whether the rich should be squeezed harder. The latest financial crisis naturally ushered in that debate, not to mention the “Panama Papers” showing how investors have been hiding money in tax havens alongside thugs and kleptocrats. Unfortunately, however, the debate often stops where the interesting discussion should start, and never goes as far as addressing what type of business ownership encourages bad versions of capitalism. There is a great deal of difference between various owners, and they tend to spawn different outcomes.

(i)n17 savings aggregate (i) corporate (cash hoarding) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) retirement (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Schmidt, Eric (i) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Schumpeterian innovation (i), (ii) “scientific civilization” thinking, and planning (i) scientific research (i) see also R&D; research Scrooge character (i) “second half of the chessboard” (Ray Kurzweil) (i) Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee) (i), (ii) Second World countries, and globalization (i) Seinfeld (TV series) Art Vandelay and “importer-exporter” conversation (i), (ii) “Art Vandelay logistics operation” (i) self-driving vehicles see driverless vehicles self-regulation (i) Sellers, Peter (i) Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, Le Défi américain (The American Challenge) (i) services and globalization (i) and market contestability (i), (ii) and second unbundling of production (i) see also online services “servicification” (or “servitization”) (i), (ii) SetPoint nerve stimulator (i) shale gas, and regulation in Europe (i) shareholders (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) shares buybacks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) share/stock structures (i) see also stock markets Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound (i) shipping containers (i) short-termism (i) Sidecar (i) SIFIs (systemically important financial institutions) (i) Silicon Valley (i), (ii), (iii) silo curse (i) Silvia, John (i) Simons, Bright (i) Simphal, Thibaud (i) Sinclair, Clive (i) Sinn, Hans-Werner, “bazaar economy” (i) size see corporate size skill deficiencies, and productivity (i) Skype (i), (ii) Slyngstad, Yngve (i) smartphones (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Smith, Adam economy of specialization (i) labor and wealth (i) “man of system” (i) The Wealth of Nations (i), (ii) Smiths, The (rock band), “hang the DJ” lyric (i) social democratic vision (i) social regulation (i), (ii) socialism and bureaucracy (i) and community-generated content (i) corporate socialism (i), (ii) and Cybersyn project (i) and death of capitalism utopia (i) and labor vs. work (i) market socialism (i) and open source technology (i) socialist planning (i) and Swedish hybrid economy (i) Söderberg, Hjalmar (i) software technology, and regulation (i) Sombart, Werner (i) Sony (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) sourdough production, history of (i) South Africa, taxi services and regulation (i) South Korea “Asian Tiger” (i) R&D spending (i) Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (i) sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) (i), (ii), (iii) “Soviet–Harvard illusion” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) (i) space flights, commercial (i) SpaceX (i) Spain biofuels regulation (i) and diffusion of innovations (i) and globalization (i) left-wing populism (i) lesser dependence on larger enterprises (i) pensions (i) public debt (i) taxi services and regulation (i) specialization and corporate control (i) and creative destruction (i) and deregulation (i) and firm boundaries (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and innovation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and organization (i) and sunk costs (i), (ii) vertical (i), (ii) speech codes, in universities (i) staff turnover rates, and economic dynamism (i) Stanford University (i), (ii) Star Trek (TV series) (i) start-ups (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Startup Genome Report (i) statistics see recorded data (national accounts) Statoil (i) Stein, Gertrude, “there is no there there” quote (i) Stern, Ariel Dora (i) stock markets changing role of (i) and corporate politics (i) post-financial crisis growth (i) and sovereign wealth funds (i) see also shareholders; shares stockholding periods (i), (ii), (iii) strategic management (i) strategic planning (i) strategy, and managerialism (i) Stratos pacemaker (i) subprime mortgage crisis (US) (i) see also financial crisis (2007) subsidies domestic companies (i) US firms (i) sunk costs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Sunstein, Cass (i) supply chains fragmentation of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) German-Central European supply chain (i), (ii) globalization of (i), (ii) and market concentration (i) marketization of (i) and multinationals (i) and Nokia (i) outsourcing of (i) and private standards (i) see also value chains Sweden corporate renewal levels (i) economic situation: 1970s–1980s (i); globalization and post-financial crisis (i) productivity and incomes (i) services and globalization (i) sourdough hotel (Stockholm) (i) state telecommunication monopoly and mobile technology (i) SWFs (sovereign wealth funds) (i), (ii), (iii) SWOT analyses (i) systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) (i) Tabarrok, Alex (i) tablets (i), (ii) Taibbi, Matt, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?” (i) Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, “Soviet–Harvard illusion” (The Black Swan) (i) tax havens (i) taxes and debt vs. equity financing (i), (ii) and labor (i) and policy uncertainty (i) in Sweden (i) taxi services and driverless cars debate (i) and regulation (i) tech entrepreneurs (i) tech incubators (i) technofeudal society (i) technological platforms, and regulation (i) technological singularity (i) technological unemployment (i), (ii) technology and capitalism (i) dystopian visions of (i) and economy (i), (ii), (iii) and employment (i) and French dirigisme (i) and innovation success (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and “scientific civilization” thinking (i) technology angst vs. technology frustration (i) technology blitz theory (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and vertical specialization (i) see also artificial intelligence; automation; diffusion; innovation; New Machine Age thesis; robotics/robots technostructure (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) telecommunications and deregulation (i) and globalization (i) and investment (i) see also Ericsson telephone (i), (ii) see also mobile phones/technology; smartphones Teles, Steven (i) Teller, Astro (i) 1066 and All That (Sellar and Yeatman) (i) Tesla (i) Texas, Special/Permanent School Fund (i) TFP (total factor productivity) growth (i), (ii), (iii) Thiel, Peter (i), (ii) Thomson, George (i) Tiberius (i) Time magazine, “The Committee to Save the World” (i) TNT, attempted acquisition of by UPS (i) total factor productivity (TFP) growth (i), (ii), (iii) Toynbee, Arnold (i), (ii) trade interfirm vs. intrafirm trade (i) see also global trade; mercantilism; protectionism transaction costs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) transmission costs (i), (ii), (iii) transparency Linaburg Maduell Transparency Index (LMTI) (i) and regulation (i), (ii) and sovereign wealth funds (i), (ii) Transparency International (i) “triple helix” models (i) “triple revolution” (i) trucking industry (US), shortages of drivers (i) Trump, Donald (i), (ii) Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (i), (ii) Tullock, Gordon (i) Twitter, and Nobel Peace Prize (i) Uber (i), (ii), (iii) unbundling of production first (i) second (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) uncertainty and compliance officers (i), (ii) and entrepreneurship (i) and financial regulation (i) and globalist worldview (i), (ii) market uncertainty (i), (ii) policy uncertainty (i), (ii) and probabilistic approach (i), (ii) and risk (i), (ii) and strategy (i) see also predictability; regulatory complexity/uncertainty; volatility unemployment and decoupling (productivity/wages) thesis (i) and Great Recession (i) and New Machine Age hype (i) and productivity (i) technological unemployment (i), (ii) see also labor unicorns (firms) (i) United Kingdom (UK) “boom and bust” and Gordon Brown (i) business investment: declining trend (i); as a proportion of GDP (i) corporate net lending (i), (ii) corporate profit margins (1948–2014) (i), (ii) dependence on larger enterprises (i) EU Leave campaign and older generation (i) exports to China (i) financialization of real economy (i) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii) income inequality and generations (i) “Independent Review of UK Economic Statistics” (Charles Bean) (i) London Stock Exchange and sovereign wealth funds (i) managerialism (i) Middle Ages economy (i) pension deficits (i) pensioners vs. working-age households incomes (i) productivity and incomes (i) productivity puzzle (i) R&D spending (i) retirement savings (i) United States (US) academia and speech codes (i) American Financial Stability Oversight Council (i) banks: and compliance officers (i); and financial regulations (i) Blue Ribbon Commission (i) Burning Man festival (Nevada) (i) capital expenditure (capex) (i)n39 car industry: driverless cars (i); and environment-related regulations (i); and lean production (i) Code of Federal Regulations (i) Consumer Protection Act (i) corporate cash hoarding (i) corporate net lending (i), (ii) corporate profit margins (1948–2014) (i), (ii) corporate renewal levels (i) corporate retained earnings figures (i) corporations’ decline (1980s) (i) debt vs. equity (i) diffusion of innovations (i) dockers and containerization (i) Dodd–Frank Act (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) (i) Federal Register (i) Federal Reserve (i) financial governance (1990s) (i) financialization of real economy (i) firm entry-and-exit rates (i), (ii), (iii) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (i), (ii), (iii) GDP figures (i), (ii) and globalization (i), (ii), (iii) high-tech sector (i) Inc 500 ranking (i) incomes: and benefits (i); inequality and generations (i); inequality and productivity (i); and productivity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) information and communications technology: hardware investment as share of GDP (i), (ii); intensity and productivity (i); sector (i), (ii) investment: business investment declining trend (i), (ii); corporate borrowing and low investment levels (i); corporate investment and shareholders (i), (ii); institutional investors (i); private investment (i) labor: ATMs and teller jobs (i); farming occupation statistics (i); job creation and destruction trends (i), (ii), (iii); labor market flexibility, low rates of (i); occupational licenses (i), (ii); staff turnover rates (i); truck drivers, shortages of (i) market concentration (1997–2012) (i), (ii) Memphis International Airport and FedEx hub (i) mergers and acquisitions (i) New York Stock Exchange (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) North American Free Trade Agreement (i) Organization Man (i) pessimism and capitalist decline (i) policy uncertainty (i), (ii) productivity: downward trend (i), (ii), (iii); via foreign operations (i)n46; and ICT intensity (i); and income inequality (i); and incomes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v); total factor productivity (TFP) growth (i), (ii)n11; and un/employment (i) profit margins (i) public debt (i) public pensions (i) R&D spending (i), (ii), (iii) regulation/deregulation: air cargo services deregulation (i); car industry and environment-related regulations (i); Code of Federal Regulations (i); compliance officers and Dodd–Frank rules (i); drone aircraft rules (i); green building codes (i); index of regulatory freedom (i), (ii); index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii); medical devices (i); taxi services (i), (ii) retirement savings (i) robots, fear of (i) Silicon Valley (i), (ii), (iii) start-ups and entrepreneurship (i), (ii) stock market crash and modern portfolio theory (i) subprime mortgage crisis (i) subsidies to firms (i) Texas Special/Permanent School Fund (i) trade: and big business (i); index of regulatory trade barriers (i), (ii) Wall Street (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) universities, and erosion of dissent (i) University of Chicago (i) University of Oxford, Future of Humanity Institute (i) UPS, attempted acquisition of TNT (i) urbanization, and diffusion of innovations (i) value vs. numbers (i) value innovation (i) value chains fragmentation of (i), (ii), (iii) and German corporations (i) globalization of (i), (ii) and market concentration (i) marketization of (i) and outsourcing of supply chains (i) “slicing up” of (i), (ii) and specialization (i), (ii) see also supply chains Van Reenen, John (i) Vanguard Group (i) Vernon, John A.


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

But just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” tax evasion by the rich is where the money is. Most Americans, after all, have most of their taxes automatically taken out of their wages. Rich people and corporations, by contrast, are largely responsible for reporting their complex earnings and capital gains, and they have the will and the way to use intricate partnerships, offshore tax havens, and other devices that skirt or cross legal lines. Yet, as the investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has painstakingly documented, audits of high-income taxpayers and businesses have plummeted. About the only area where audits have gone up is among poorer taxpayers who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit.12 Another way public officials have cut the taxes of upper-income filers without passing new laws is by leaving in place loopholes through which rich Americans and their accountants shovel lightly taxed cash.

., 95, 96–100, 116, 117, 120, 125, 141, 165, 186, 189, 199, 200, 202, 293, 302 Nixonland (Perlstein), 95, 96–98, 115 Norgay, Tenzing, 102, 135 Norquist, Grover, 208, 212, 284 Nunn, Sam, 181 Obama, Barack, 8, 54, 97, 106, 126, 196, 225, 233, 234–35, 245, 255–73, 282, 284, 286–88, 291, 301–2, 304–5 O’Brien, Larry, 269 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 97 Off Center (Hacker and Pierson), 157, 264 Office of Consumer Representation, 126–27 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 260 Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, 272 offshore tax havens, 50 oil industry, 63, 104, 119, 144, 189, 280 oligarchies, 4, 6, 76–77, 80, 82 Olin, John, 122–23 Olin Foundation, 123 O’Neill, Paul, 217 O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip,” 127, 129, 176, 187, 188, 229, 241 opinion polls, 109–10, 126, 148, 152–53, 155, 171, 175, 176, 214, 258, 268, 285–86 Organizing for America (OFA), 259, 285, 304–5 Organization, 102–10; see also interest groups Orszag, Peter, 260 Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It (Brandeis), 80–81, 82 Packer, George, 235 Page, Benjamin, 152 Paine, Thomas, 75 Palin, Sarah, 54, 268 Panama Canal Treaty (1977), 130 parliamentary system, 84, 168, 243, 270 partisanship, 85, 95; see also bipartisanship, Democratic Party, polarization, Republican Party, Paulson, Henry, 41–42, 195, 261 “pay-as-you-go” rules, 213 payroll taxes, 47, 99–100, 214, 312n Pelosi, Nancy, 251, 252, 258, 260 pensions, 29–30, 57, 64, 86, 89, 220 Perkins, Frances, 89 Perlstein, Rick, 95 Perot, Ross, 232 Peterson, Pete, 302 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), 238, 239 pharmaceuticals industry, 238, 239, 271, 275, 281 Philippon, Thomas, 69–70 Phillips, Kevin, 97–98 picketing, common-site, 128–29 Piketty, Thomas, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 47–48 Pitt, Harvey, 219, 221 Plouffe, David, 259 Polanyi, Karl, 55 polarization, 95–96, 148, 158–60, 188, 189–93, 210–15, 241, 262–73, 286–88, 298–300 Polarized America (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal), 158–59 political actions committees (PACs), 118, 121–22, 128, 145–46, 171–72, 173, 177–78, 227 politics: business influence on, 65–66, 74, 79, 84–85, 104–7, 110–12, 116–36, 150–51, 160, 169, 170–72, 179–80, 183–84, 197–98, 207, 230–31, 242–43, 271–75, 282, 292–93, 304 coalitions in, 125, 126–27, 234 conservatism and, 5, 7, 19–24, 41–42, 49, 54, 77, 115, 122–24, 134, 137, 165–66, 179–82, 184, 186–88, 189, 191, 204, 208, 217, 233, 239–41, 267 corruption in, 79, 86, 183, 207, 238–39, 257 economic impact of, 7–8, 71–72, 74–77, 90, 148, 149–51, 239–41, 256–57 “as electoral spectacle,” 100–102 fragmentation of, 84, 91–115 liberalism and, 5, 7, 43, 53–56, 62, 68, 69, 88–90, 91, 95–100, 110, 115, 116–19, 137, 138, 140, 145–48, 159–60, 163, 178, 179, 181, 186–89, 200, 225, 234, 239, 256–57, 305 local, 226, 229–30, 239–41 lower class influence in, 3, 4, 13, 74, 135–36, 143–49, 158, 165, 234, 274 majorities vs. minorities in, 71–72, 76–79, 111–12, 237–44, 269–70, 278, 297–300 media coverage of, 2, 101–6, 107, 121, 127, 140, 155–58, 167–68, 175, 196, 274, 280, 294, 295, 302 middle class influence in, 3, 4, 12, 13, 57, 73, 74, 78, 96, 110–12, 131, 134, 135–36, 138–39, 141–49, 158, 184, 225, 234, 238, 239, 271, 274, 292, 293, 296, 301, 302–3, 304, 305–6 moderates in, 99, 140, 152, 158–60, 163, 179, 180–82, 189–95, 199, 200–201, 209–11, 217, 231–32, 237–41, 244, 245, 261, 263, 264, 267, 280, 281, 293–94 “as organized combat,” 116–36, 138, 259–62, 271–73, 275, 291–93, 295, 300–301 personalities in, 104–5, 171 power, 73, 89–90, 113, 117–18, 169–70, 272–73, 301 progressivism and, 79–82, 83, 86–87, 90, 200, 232, 245, 297, 298, 306 public opinion in, 107, 109–10, 123, 126, 148, 152–53, 155, 171, 175, 176, 214, 258, 268, 281, 285–86, 294–95 reform of, 8, 73, 79–82, 83, 304–6 two-party system for, 85, 86, 89–90, 143, 160, 163–93, 203, 233–34 winner-take-all, see winner-take-all politics “politics of renewal,” 87–91, 255–73, 280–88, 289, 291–97, 300, 301–2, 305 political inequality, 36, 41–42, 52–55, 74–79, 87, 100, 150, 151–55, 167, 191 Poole, Keith, 158–59 populism, 76–79, 95–96, 97, 104, 184, 223–24, 231, 234–35, 261, 282, 292, 295 Positively American (Schumer), 225 Posner, Richard, 248 postmaterialism, 145–46, 147, 179 poverty, 28, 31, 52, 74, 75, 77–79, 88, 89, 111–12 Powell, Lewis, 117–18, 119, 125, 135 predatory lending, 197, 277 presidency, 89, 98–100, 113, 130, 131, 132–33, 137–38, 164, 175, 200 prices: consumer, 32, 52–53, 63, 100, 119 housing, 2, 27, 32–33, 88, 133, 197, 216, 253 inflation of, 21–22, 32, 36, 52–53, 100, 119, 140, 187, 216, 253 Prince, Charles O., III, 226 private equity firms, 228–30 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) (1995), 219 Procter & Gamble, 117, 120 Progressives, 79–82, 83, 86–87, 90, 200, 232, 245, 297, 298, 306 progressive taxation, 47, 48–49, 98, 133, 200, 214, 301 property taxes, 77–79 public interest groups, 120–21, 126–27, 139, 144–46, 147 Putnam, Robert, 143 Quayle, Dan, 339n Rand, Ayn, 254 Ratigan, Dylan, 106 Rattner, Steven, 225 Raynes, Burt, 116 Reagan, Ronald, 17, 19, 49, 58–59, 99, 133, 134, 163–66, 172, 174, 175, 180, 184, 186–88, 189, 191, 196, 199, 200, 202, 203, 208, 212, 217, 233, 236, 267, 269, 282, 293 real estate, 2, 27, 32–33, 77–79, 88, 133, 197, 216, 240, 253, 271–72, 274 recessions in, 3, 12–13, 101, 127–28, 133, 165, 195, 212, 292 redistricting, congressional, 175, 258 “red states,” 101–2, 147–48, 272, 281 Reed, John, 249–50 Reed, Ralph, 203, 204 Rehnquist, William, 109 Reid, Harry, 159 Religious Right, 139, 146–49, 160, 201–4, 205, 234–35 “Renewing the American Economy,” 256–57 Republican Eagles, 173 Republican National Committee (RNC), 166, 172–76, 178, 250–51 Republican Party, 163–93 agenda of, 95–96, 97, 168–70, 199–204, 208–15, 221–22, 234–39, 262–73, 283–85, 293–95 business support for, 34, 49, 53, 65, 86, 121–26, 129–32, 140, 157, 170, 174–88, 189, 194–222, 230–31, 244–46, 267 campaign spending by, 163–64, 166, 167, 170–84, 207, 209–10, 219, 223, 230–31, 238–39, 250–51, 275, 276 congressional majority of, 34, 89–90, 97–98, 109, 130–32, 157–58, 175–76, 178, 188, 189–93, 199, 210–15, 220, 230–31, 236–37, 238, 243–44, 262–73, 278–88 conservative wing of, 95–96, 115, 122–24, 130–32, 140, 146–49, 159–60, 163–66, 172–73, 179–80, 183, 188, 189–93, 194–95, 199–204, 206, 208–15, 221–22, 228, 233, 234–39, 255, 262–73, 283–85, 293–95, 296, 302 Democratic cooperation with, 186–93, 199–200, 210–15, 230–31, 233–34, 236–44, 247–48, 262–73, 278–88, 294–95, 302, 303 economic policies of, 17, 34, 41–42, 49, 65, 95–100, 109, 157, 207–15, 235, 240–41, 244–48, 255, 262–73 generational change in, 130, 189–93, 210–11, 265 incumbent members of, 209–10 labor unions opposed by, 58–59, 129–32, 186–87 leadership of, 130–32, 188, 189–93, 200–201, 210–15, 283 lower class support for, 98, 146–49, 165 middle class support for, 97–98, 111–12, 146–49 moderates in, 140, 163, 189–95, 199, 200–201, 209–11, 217, 232, 238–39, 240, 244, 263, 264, 267, 280, 281, 293–94 obstructionist tactics of, 188, 189–93, 199–200, 210–15, 237–44, 262–73, 278–88, 294–95, 302, 303 organizational basis of, 163–64, 166–68, 172–76, 199–200, 210–11, 230–31, 263, 271–73 populism in, 95–96, 97 presidency controlled by, 91, 95, 96–98, 140, 175, 199 religious evangelical support for, 139, 146–49, 160, 201–4, 234–35 Southern wing of, 190–91, 200–201, 210–11, 234–35 tax cuts policy of, 34, 49, 157, 207–15, 244–46, 267 upper class support for, 110–11, 147–49 winner-take-all politics supported by, 8, 182, 185–86, 194–95, 221–22, 224–25, 228–30, 235, 236–37, 255, 257, 261, 268, 278, 289–306 Republican Senate Campaign Committee, 178 “Republicans for a Day,” 239–41, 244, 267, 305 “Republicans in name only” (RINOs), 210 Reshef, Ariell, 69–70 retirement benefits, 29–30, 31, 57, 60, 64, 86, 89, 220 revenue, 188, 203, 208, 212, 213, 245–46 Richistan, 15, 17, 24–25, 25, 26, 194, 290 Riddell, W.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

Francisco Thoumi has pointed out that if it were true that the illegal drugs business contributed to economic growth in the United States, canny economists would recommend that Colombia declare tobacco illegal, thereby raising cigarette prices and increasing smuggling, which would then generate revenue to buoy the country’s national income. Corporations pay taxes to governments; cocaine dealers do not. Corrupt people and tax havens benefit from the trade in illegal drugs, but a country’s economic system does not. Thankfully, there are trustworthy sources of information on the size of the drugs economy. Whatever its size, the economics of the drugs business clearly favours its practitioners. There are thought to be about 300 major drug importers into Britain, 3,000 wholesalers and 70,000 street dealers.

Policing the international financial system has become harder because free trade zones, extra-territorial banking, electronic money transfers and smart cards have made the movement of capital much easier over the past twenty years. Every day, there are 70,000 international money transfers, shunting £1 trillion to and from accounts around the world. In 1979, there were seventy-five offshore tax havens. Today, there are more than 3,000, and nearly half of the world’s money supply passes through them. These havens have institutionalized tax evasion by the world’s greatest fortunes. They have also given money-launderers many more options. The neo-liberal economic reforms that have been foisted on the Third World also favour the international drugs trade.


pages: 424 words: 122,350

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

He managed, by 2006, to raise £1.65 million, enough to buy the 10,000-acre Dundreggan estate in Glenmoriston. The Italian owner had died intestate, and the sale of his property was tortuous. As so many of the absentee landlords of Scotland do, he had channelled his assets through holding companies in a tax haven: in this case Liechtenstein. The legal knots took two years to untie. But, as Alan says, ‘when you have a 250-year vision, you have to learn to relax a bit’. Like most of the land in this region, the estate (with the exception of two small corners under forestry and sheep) was used for deer stalking.

It took as its case study the county of Sutherland, a wide territory in the far north of Scotland, covering 5,200 square kilometres. Of this, the report reveals, 4,000 square kilometres are in the hands of estates, which number just eighty-one. In other words, three-quarters of one of the largest counties in Britain is owned by eighty-one families, or by their secretive trusts in tax havens. Across the ten it sampled, covering 780 square kilometres, it found 112 people in full-time equivalent employment.25 That means that just one person is employed by the dominant industry for every seven square kilometres, an area five times the size of Hyde Park. The association’s figures suggest to me that the absentee owners and their monocultures of deer prevent not only the ecological regeneration of the region but also the economic regeneration.


pages: 165 words: 47,405

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

Consistently about 25 percent of FDI was going to Bermuda, around 15 percent was going to the British Cayman Islands, and about 10 percent to Panama. That’s roughly 50 percent of what they’re calling foreign direct investment, and it certainly was not going to build steel plants. This was just money flowing into various tax havens. Most of the rest was going for mergers and acquisitions and so on. These are huge sums. The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous. In any event, corporations and rich people barely pay taxes, so they’re doing fine. But the general population has gone through thirty years of either stagnation or decline in real wages, with people working longer hours with fewer benefits.


pages: 221 words: 46,396

The Left Case Against the EU by Costas Lapavitsas

anti-work, antiwork, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, declining real wages, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, hiring and firing, low interest rates, machine translation, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, post-work, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck

To determine its response the European Left ought to consider Greece, the country that has been the laboratory for EU economic, political, and social developments in the 2010s. Notes 1. See Lapavitsas (2013: ch. 9). 2. Ireland also found itself in deep crisis in 2010, and the country certainly moves in a peripheral orbit within the EMU. But its economy is distinctly different to that of Southern peripheral countries since it acts as a tax haven for a host of US multinationals operating in Europe and elsewhere. The crisis in Ireland, nonetheless, shared several common features with other EMU countries, notably the tremendous expansion of domestic debt which eventually fell on the shoulders of the public. For that reason reference will be made to Ireland throughout the subsequent chapters. 3.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

Regulators could have prohibited big, profitable companies from laying off a large number of workers all at once and required them to pay severance—say, a year of wages—to anyone they let go, and train them for new jobs. The minimum wage could have been linked to inflation. Why did we fail to raise taxes on the rich and fail to cut them for poorer Americans? Why did we fail to attack overseas tax havens by threatening loss of U.S. citizenship to anyone who keeps his money abroad in order to escape U.S. taxes? America could have expanded public investments in research and development, and required any corporation that commercialized such investments to create the resulting new jobs in the United States.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The rate of cheating did not increase with the probability that their cheating would remain undetected. (14) The trick with this pair of loopholes is to establish two Irish subsidiaries: one based in a tax haven that holds the rights to its intellectual property outside the U.S., and another based in Ireland that receives the income gained from that property. In order to avoid Irish taxes, a third subsidiary—a Dutch corporation—serves as a transfer for royalties flowing from the subsidiary in Ireland to the tax haven. This byzantine arrangement is legal, even if those three corporations exist on paper only, and allows the parent company to avoid the IRS, even if it is entirely located in the United States


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

The necessary techniques for operating with cover include front companies, so-called cutouts, secret agents, cover stories, and entities layered on top of each other so that the unwitting points of contact cannot see the controlling parties. A covert hedge fund structure involves layers of legal entities in tax-haven countries offering the enemy sponsor a deep cover. Professional assistance is needed from corrupt lawyers or bankers who retain innocent professionals to handle detailed work such as fund administration. Directors are recruited from the advisory companies in offshore jurisdictions that offer administration services to investors.

The “unlucky” gambler later recovers the cash from the corrupt casino operator, minus a commission for the money-laundering service rendered. Even larger amounts are moved offshore through the mis-invoicing of exports and imports. For example, a Chinese furniture manufacturer can create a shell distribution company in a tax haven jurisdiction such as Panama. Assuming the normal export price of each piece of furniture is $200, the Chinese manufacturer can underinvoice the Panamanian company and charge only $100 for each piece. The Panamanian company can then resell into normal distribution channels for the usual price of $200 per piece.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Joseph Menn, “Data Collection Arms Race Feeds Privacy Fears,” Reuters (February 19, 2012), http://www.reuters.com/article/us-data-collection -idUSTRE81I0AP20120219. Evgeny Morozov, “Socialize the Data Centres!” New Left Review, January– February 2015, http://newleft review.org/II/91/evgeny-morozov-socialize-the -data-centres. Oxfam, “David Cameron: End the Era of Tax Havens So That We Can End Poverty” (2016), https://act.oxfam.org/great-britain/tax-havens-2016- 644e5810 -f58e-40f5-8162-d09b2392efa6?sid=2016 -01-18 _ogbsite _ homepage. Graeme Warden, “Oxfam: 85 Richest People as Wealthy as Poorest Half of the World,” The Guardian, January 20, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com /business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-richest-people-half-of-the-world (quoting Winnie Byanyima).


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

These were the internet, Facebook in particular; outer space, where, he said, new rocket technologies were making space colonies more likely; and, of course, seasteading. It was in the tradition of the Stanford Review’s outrageousness, but unlike the most inflammatory posts Thiel had published at the college paper, he was the author of this one. Needless to say, the idea that humanity should celebrate Peter Thiel’s attempts to build an offshore tax haven but mourn the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment did not lead to universal acclaim. “Facebook backer wishes women couldn’t vote,” wrote Thomas in Valleywag, calling Thiel “loopy.” Thiel posted a clarification to Cato’s website, in which he offered a non-apology for his comments about women.

Denny’s idiosyncratic medium for the show was board games—and he’d adapted a handful of well-known favorites including Operation and The Game of Life, as well as some of the games popular within the Thielverse, including Settlers of Catan and Descent: Journeys in the Dark, a D&D-like board game. Life was reimagined as a series of choices for a young Stanford graduate involving either socially conscious activities, like paying your taxes, or libertarian ones, like escaping to a tax haven. In Denny’s Descent spinoff, Ascent: Above the Nation State, Thiel’s likeness appeared on a plastic figurine, the “contrarian hero,” fighting a dragon labeled “democracy,” a lion labeled “fair elections,” and an ogre labeled “monetary policy.” “It’s, uh, actually a work of phenomenal detail,” Thiel had remarked to an attendee.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Nations hire McKinsey to advise sovereign wealth funds worth more than $1 trillion. McKinsey’s own robust earnings make it possible for the firm to run a private hedge fund for senior partners, with large parts of its roughly $31.5 billion in assets under management concealed behind a tangle of shell companies on an island tax haven in the English Channel. McKinsey’s reputation is enhanced by the success of its former consultants, including Tom Cotton, the conservative U.S. senator from Arkansas; Pete Buttigieg, U.S. secretary of transportation; Bobby Jindal, former governor of Louisiana; Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook; Lou Gerstner of IBM and American Express; and James P.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT including The New York Times: Edmund Lee, “New York Times’ Digital Subscription Growth Story May Be Ending,” Recode, Aug. 25, 2014. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “armored personnel carriers”: Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, “How McKinsey Lost Its Way in South Africa,” New York Times, June 26, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT island tax haven in the English Channel: See MIO Partners Inc. SEC Form ADV, filed July 29, 2021, sec.report. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT McKinsey’s reputation is enhanced by: Other prominent former McKinsey consultants include Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, and Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor who was among the candidates to be Fed chair.


pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

On 15 January, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag ran an interview with Hammond in which he suggested Britain could transform its economic model into that of a corporate tax haven if the EU failed to do a deal on market access. ‘If we are forced to be something different, then we will have to become something different,’ he said. Asked to clarify, he added, ‘We could be forced to change our economic model to regain competitiveness. You can be sure we will do whatever we have to do. The British people are not going to lie down and say, “Too bad, we’ve been wounded”. We will change our model and we will come back, and we will be competitively engaged.’ Jeremy Corbyn dismissed this vision of the UK as Singapore-on-Sea as a ‘bargain basement tax haven’. But Hammond had been concerned that May’s speech would cause the pound to fall and he wanted them to see the government had a plan.

• Theresa May says she’s challenging the opposition to stop ‘blocking’ Brexit • Reality is she wants to forestall unpopularity as reckless Brexit unravels and living standards turn down What kind of Brexit? Making this a referendum re-run is a trap. Brexit is settled. But what kind of Brexit is not. The choice: Tory reckless Brexit • Britain a low-wage tax haven • Workers’ rights ‘unsustainable’ (Liam Fox) Or a people’s Brexit • Access to the single market to protect jobs and living standards • Workers’ rights and consumer and environmental standards secured • Building a new economy – investing in infrastructure, skills, new technology, green industries Tories – evading scrutiny Seven years of Tory austerity, aided by LibDems, has meant: • Economic failure • Most families worse off • NHS and public services cut and plundered by privatisation • Housebuilding at its lowest since 1920s • Attacks on disabled and other vulnerable groups • Schools facing cuts and rising class sizes Tories – a Britain only for the richest – Tax handouts (2016–2022) • Corporation Tax – £63.8 billion • Inheritance Tax – £3.6 billion • Capital Gains Tax – £0.8 billion • Bank Levy – £5.4 billion Labour’s core theme Instead of a country run for the rich … Labour wants a Britain where all of us can lead richer lives Labour – 10-day policy ‘blitz’ just a taster • Free primary school meals to help learning and health • Increasing the carer’s allowance • Giving pensioners dignity and security • An environment for small businesses to grow • A £10 minimum wage • Ending high street bank closures Labour – a real alternative for Britain Core strategy for investment, job creation and upgrading the economy • A national investment bank • Regional investment banks • Modernising infrastructure • Creating a high-skill, high-tech, green economy • Employment rights for good jobs The challenge we face Polling advice: ‘Party is in a weak position with undecided and considerers, and simply attacking the Tories tends only to worsen our position.’


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

$18 trillion of assets offshore: This sum represents 10, 20–30, and 50 percent of the total assets owned by the rich in North America, Europe, and Latin America respectively. See Winters, Oligarchy, 233. Wealth in tax havens is, for obvious reasons, difficult to find and measure. For some of the complexities, see Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman, “Who Owns Wealth in Tax Havens: Macro Evidence and Implications for Global Inequality,” NBER Working Paper No. 23805 (September 2017), 8, www.nber.org/papers/w23805.pdf. fell by perhaps a third: For the share of national income belonging to the top 1 percent of earners, see Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, Just How Progressive Is the US Tax Code?

A combination of high exemptions and generous opportunities for tax planning means that in 2016, even before the 2017 tax reform further weakened the tax, fewer than fifty-three hundred families across the entire country paid any estate tax at all. The estate tax is extreme but not exceptional. The broader complex of lawyers, accountants, and bankers advising the rich on tax havens is sufficiently large to allow what the industry calls high-net-worth individuals (people with more than $30 million of investable assets) worldwide to move roughly $18 trillion of assets offshore. Overall, during the same decades in which the top 1 percent’s share of national income roughly doubled, the tax rates that it faced fell by perhaps a third.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

Or to discuss the suffering caused across the board by “downsizing” when the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the category of “executives, managers, and administrative personnel” for US companies grew almost 30 percent from 1983 to 1993,53 while compensation for executives skyrocketed (and easily retains its international lead, relative to labor costs)—apparently with little or no correlation to performance.54 Similarly, some caution seems necessary in lauding the marvels of the “emerging markets” when the leading recipient of US Foreign Direct Investment in the hemisphere (Canada aside) is Bermuda, with about one-quarter, another 20 percent going to other tax havens, much of the rest to such “economic miracles” as Mexico, which followed the dictates of the “Washington consensus” with unusual obedience, and less than glorious consequences for the overwhelming majority.55 In fact, the very notions of “capitalism” and “markets” seem to be disappearing from consciousness, much like the concept of democracy.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

Capital can be held first, as cash; second, for security purposes and invested in safe assets; or third, as investment for speculative purposes. For most classical economists, and for their present-day followers, the management of capital and cross-border capital flows is a matter of third-order importance. Positive Money campaigners are relaxed about ‘offshore’ capital and capital mobility, though of course they campaign against tax havens and tax evasion. Erratic and speculative capital flows across borders, while welcome to international financiers and creditors, strip domestic policy-makers of autonomy and the ability to adopt policies that best determine the interests and prosperity of the population of that country. These offshore flows lead of course to tax evasion, but also to harmful exchange rate volatility (‘currency wars’) that are especially dangerous for poor countries.


pages: 190 words: 53,970

Eastern standard tribe by Cory Doctorow

airport security, call centre, forensic accounting, high net worth, machine readable, moral panic, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pirate software, Silicon Valley, the payments system

Art and Linda drank ginger beer in the observation car, spiking it with rum from a flask that Linda carried in a garter that she wore for the express purpose of being able to reach naughtily up her little sundress and produce a bottle of body-temperature liquor in a nickel-plated vessel whose shiny sides were dulled by the soft oil of her thigh. Canada Customs and Immigration separated them at the border, sending Art for a full inspection -- a privilege of being a Canadian citizen and hence perennially under suspicion of smuggling goods from the tax havens of the US into the country -- and leaving Linda in their little Pullman cabin. When Art popped free of the bureaucracy, his life thoroughly peered into, he found Linda standing on the platform, leaning against a pillar, back arched, one foot flat against the bricks, corresponding dimpled knee exposed to the restless winds of the trainyard.


pages: 161 words: 52,058

The Art of Corporate Success: The Story of Schlumberger by Ken Auletta

Albert Einstein, Bretton Woods, data science, George Gilder, job satisfaction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, union organizing

Finally, in 1956, a new parent company, Schlumberger Limited, was created to unify operations. Pierre Schlumberger became president; Henri Doll was elected chairman of the board. The company was incorporated on the island of Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles, which was then becoming one of the world’s prime tax havens. Pierre Schlumberger, in Houston, supervised the company’s worldwide operations. He took the company public, selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange, and declared that family members would no longer receive preference within the company for promotion. This angered family members, who were uneasy, in Riboud’s words, because they wished “to keep family control of the company”—but as profits rose discontent dissipated.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

They have also seen efforts to insulate in the expansion of international investment law designed to protect foreign investors from diverse forms of expropriation and to provide a parallel global ­legal system known as the transnational law merchant.20 They have traced the emergence of an “offshore world” of tax havens and the proliferation of zones of many types, all designed to provide safe harbor for capital, f­ ree from fear of infringement by policies of progressive taxation or re­distribution.21 “Insulation of markets” is a useful meta­phorical description of the aim I n t r o d u ctio n 5 of neoliberalism as a specific institution-­building proj­ect rather than as a nebulous “logic” or “rationality.”

One scholar writes of the “nonmajoritarian” models of governance in port authorities and the idea of central bank in­de­pen­dence.20 Still ­others have seen this strain in the Eu­ro­pean Central Bank and the governance structure of the Eu­ro­pean Union.21 Other scholars have described the creation of an “offshore world” of tax havens through which nations compete to offer the least pos­si­ble corporate tax, the greatest pos­si­ble secrecy, and the best incentives for individuals and corporations to flee the clutches of their own redistributive states.22 Discussions in the 1990s and beyond have been dominated by “locational competition” and the idea of “policy competition.”23 At the root of the neoliberal idea of international order is the notion of so-­called competitive federalism, with the possibility of capital following opportunities across borders wherever they arise.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Living standards in Europe fall well short of those in America. In 2012 Britons were 28 per cent poorer than Americans – as measured by gross domestic product per person, adjusted for differences in purchasing power – while people in the eurozone were 30 per cent worse off. Except for Luxembourg and Switzerland, both tax havens, and oil-rich Norway, all European countries were poorer than America. The best performers otherwise were Austria (15 per cent poorer) and Sweden (16 per cent); figures for a selection of other countries are in the footnotes.91 The gap between average incomes in the US and Europe can be broken down into three factors.

If people on lower incomes were exempt from taxes on work altogether, this would make society much fairer. At a time of high unemployment, it ought to be a no-brainer. The shortfall in tax revenues would be filled by taxing land values. This wouldn’t reduce the supply of land, which is fixed and immovable: Mayfair can’t be spirited away to a tax haven. Nor would it push up rents, which depend on what tenants are prepared to pay rather than landlords’ expenses.725 Thus, unlike most taxes, it wouldn’t crimp economic activity, as Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations. On the contrary, a land tax would encourage development. Since it would be payable irrespective of how land is used, it would stimulate the regeneration of derelict and unused sites.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Among his ideas are to create a global financial registry that would keep track of wealth no matter where it is (making it possible to tax wealth no matter where it is parked), to reform the corporate tax system such that the global profits of multinational firms are apportioned to where they make their sales, and to more strongly regulate banks and law firms that help people evade taxes through tax havens.72 Identifying a set of steps is of course not sufficient. There needs to be the political will to implement them. The three steps Zucman recommends may be particularly tricky since they involve international cooperation, and the men (yes, almost always men) at the top right now do not seem to be all that able to join together to get things done.

New York Times, February 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/business/economy/wealth-tax-elizabeth-warren.html. 71 H. J. Kleven, Knudsen, M. B., Kreiner, C. T., Pedersen, S. and E. Saez, “Unwilling or Unable to Cheat? Evidence from a Tax Audit Experiment in Denmark,” Econometrica 79 (2011): 651–92, doi:10.3982/ECTA9113. 72 Gabriel Zucman, “Sanctions for Offshore Tax Havens, Transparency at Home,” New York Times, April 7, 2016; Gabriel Zucman, “The Desperate Inequality behind Global Tax Dodging,” Guardian, November 8, 2017. 73 Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, Camille Landais, Emmanuel Saez, and Esben Schultz, “Migration and Wage Effects of Taxing Top Earners: Evidence from the Foreigners’ Tax Scheme in Denmark,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 1 (2013): 333–78. 74 Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersly, “Democrats Want to Tax the Wealthy.


pages: 261 words: 57,595

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

In 2014, Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute, which studies China’s wealthy, found that 64 percent of “high net worth individuals” it polled—393 millionaires and billionaires—were either emigrating or planning to do so.41 Rich Chinese are sending their children to study abroad in record numbers (in itself, an indictment of the quality of the Chinese higher education system). They are buying property abroad at record levels and prices, and are parking their financial assets overseas, often in well-shielded tax havens and shell companies. Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to extradite back to China a large number of alleged financial fugitives living abroad. When a country’s elite—many of them Party members—flee in such large numbers, it is a telling sign of their lack of confidence in the regime and the nation’s future.


pages: 204 words: 60,319

Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers by Amir D. Aczel

colonial rule, double entry bookkeeping, Georg Cantor, high-speed rail, offshore financial centre, seminal paper, Y2K

And the bar was stocked with a lot of expensive liquor: scotch whisky, Calvados, Drambuie, Grand Marnier, sake. I looked at him a little puzzled. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you saw the French customs checkpoint just up the road, right? You couldn’t have missed it.” I didn’t understand. “You know that Andorra is one of the last tax havens in the world, don’t you?” I nodded. A vague notion began to surface in my mind. There was a moment’s silence. He looked at me, and then he said, “You know, late at night, there is nobody there at the checkpoint. And this house is at exactly the right place—” “Just like my mother’s suitcase,” I interrupted.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Since financial maximization took over: Public services and infrastructure have fallen into disrepair Monopolies block competition and entrepreneurship Chains starve local communities of money and opportunity Corporations and the wealthy hide an estimated 10 percent of GDP in offshore tax havens Politicians rewrite laws to help big business at the public’s expense Had America continued along its pre-financial-maximization trajectory, today: The average worker would get paid more CEOs and executives would make less, but still be among the highest-paid people on the planet Taxes for top earners would be higher Public services, infrastructure, and education would be better funded The rich would still be rich, just not as rich In other words, a stronger civil society than we have today.


pages: 231 words: 60,546

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century by Adam, Georgina(Author)

BRICs, Frank Gehry, greed is good, high net worth, inventory management, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Here is the ownership of just some of Beltracchi’s productions after they were bought at auction or at dealers: André Derain, Bateaux à Collioure: Serrano Finance and Trade SA, Wickhams Bay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Max Ernst, La Mer: Gemstone Holdings, Hong Kong. Max Ernst, La Forêt II: Salomon Trading LLC Cheyenne/Wyoming, US, and Hanna Graham Associates, Nassau, Bahamas224 – the list is long, and all involve tax havens of some sort or another. Collectors are not squeaky clean either We have seen how galleries manipulate prices, and even how auction house prices are not necessarily reliable. Another major form of manipulation can come from the collectors themselves. Collectors often sit on museum boards and so have advance knowledge of coming shows, which generally enhance the reputation – and hence the price – of the chosen artists.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

Regardless, I am awfully glad I leveled with him. Years later, the shipping sector, which I also covered, went through a bust and provided a plethora of distressed opportunities. However, our London office argued that because these companies were generally headquartered in Greece, Cyprus, or some non-U.S. tax haven, or had bonds traded in London, they had first dibs. You must be kidding, I said. What about companies that exported products or services outside of the U.S.? Were they off-limits too? Or companies with an international subsidiary or office? How about a foreign CEO? It was war, my positions, my portfolio, my territory.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

HOW THE UN-SHARING ECONOMY THREATENS WORKERS STEVEN HILL The U.S. workforce has been enduring a long downward spiral for nearly three decades. That’s how long it’s been since American workers, in aggregate, have had a pay increase. Even as corporate profits are at an all-time high, with significant chunks of it parked overseas in tax havens to avoid being taxed, not many of the benefits of that labor productivity are being returned to domestic shores. A significant factor in the decline of the quality of jobs today has been the increasing reliance by many employers on “non-regular” employees—a growing army of contractors, freelancers, temps, and part-timers that form the precarious vanguard in a “freelance society.”


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The bitter irony is that Amazon noticed that a few independent bookstores in big cities were still thriving, so it decided to go into the bookstore business itself. But Amazon is not alone in its avoidance of taxes. Bloomberg Businessweek reports, “The tactics of Google and Facebook depend on ‘transfer pricing,’ paper transactions among corporate subsidiaries that allow for allocating income to tax havens while attributing expenses to higher-tax countries. Such income shifting costs the U.S. government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue, according to Kimberly A. Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.” At a time when both local and federal governments are putting off needed infrastructure improvements because of tax revenue shortfalls, the tax avoidance schemes of our richest technology companies are partially to blame.


pages: 265 words: 71,143

Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order by Jason Sharman

British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, death of newspapers, European colonialism, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land tenure, offshore financial centre, passive investing, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, profit maximization, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs

In Cambridge and in London, Ayşe Zarakol, Duncan Bell, and George Lawson further helped me think through some big historical International Relations questions. I am also very grateful to David Runciman for providing the first link with Princeton University Press. At the Press, Sarah Caro performed an invaluable role in shepherding the manuscript through to acceptance and completion. Though this research is very different from my other interest in tax havens, money laundering, and corruption, the common thread is that any research takes time, and getting time often requires money. The Australian Research Council has been extremely generous in providing this money through grants FT120100485 and DP170101395. Some similar arguments appearing in this book were first featured in the article “Myths of Military Revolution: European Expansion and Eurocentrism,” published in the European Journal of International Relations.


pages: 218 words: 68,648

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

I told them my history, showed proof, and was set free. In the back of my mind, I wondered if the email itself was a scam. That’s life in crypto—you never know if you are emailing with a Gemini service rep or a dog smoking a cigar, headed to Malta with your sweet ETH. Speaking of Malta, I talked to two slimy characters who run a tax haven in that country. I got their contact information from a friend after I complained about my 37 percent capital gains bill. He said that a partner in his firm avoided all sorts of taxes by offshoring his money. I am a community-focused liberal who believes everyone should pay their fair share, but I was willing to make an exception in this case.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

They will be smart and safe and diverse and environmentally aware and economically healthy. They will influence the world and national governments with gathering strength. None of the three city-states that exist now—Vatican City, Monaco, and Singapore—quite fits the bill. Vatican City is a one-religion theocracy; Monaco lacks diversity and functions mainly as a tax haven for the rich; Singapore has many good traits—diversity, a strong economy, a healthy city—but its authoritarian bent cannot be ignored. There are the nascent city-states of Hamburg, Berlin, and Bremen, which have representation in the national legislature and the ability to initiate legislation.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Their arrival came as residents of the island struggled to rebuild from the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Maria, but the young millionaires—some of them were billionaires—had another priority: creating “Puertopia.” This was to be a new type of city where people paid only with cryptocurrency and laws were written on a blockchain. For the new arrivals, Puertopia invoked a paradise. For everyone else, it meant “crypto bros looking for a tax haven.” The plan would unravel less than two years later when the island’s corrupt governor, a supporter of the scheme, resigned in disgrace. Even as its economic foundation crumbled in early 2018, crypto continued to garner attention in the media and popular culture. This included a profile of Vitalik Buterin in “Lunch with the FT”—the Financial Times column where typical subjects included the likes of Jeff Bezos, Angela Merkel, and Angelina Jolie.


Day One Trader: A Liffe Story by John Sussex

algorithmic trading, Boris Johnson, credit crunch, fixed income, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, proprietary trading, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, statistical arbitrage

Hugh had taken more of a back seat, becoming almost a silent partner in Morgan Sussex. Every year he would relinquish more control of the business as we settled our affairs over a few pints in the Simpson’s Tavern. The Cannon Bridge exchange had not been open long before Hugh decided to move back to Bermuda. I flew over to the sun-drenched tax haven to see Hugh and we agreed that Morgan Sussex would become Sussex Futures. He gave me his Liffe D AY O N E T R A D E R : A L I F F E S T O R Y | 79 shares in return for a stake in the new business. Everything was agreed amicably on the first night. We just shook hands on the deal after sinking a few beers.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Between 1987 and 2013 the number of dollar billionaires around the world increased tenfold and their share of global wealth nearly quadrupled. By 2015, it was estimated that 62 people laid claim to half the world’s total wealth (down from 388 in 2010).64 Since a large chunk of private wealth was stashed in offshore tax havens, reported figures understated the true extent of wealth inequality.65 Wealth wasn’t so much trickling down, said the aid charity Oxfam, as being ‘sucked upwards’.66 THE 99 PER CENT It is questionable whether inequality caused the financial crisis, but there’s no doubt that the costs of the crisis were unevenly distributed.

., 163–4 Röpke, Wilhelm, 97, 100, 299 Rothbard, Murray, 30 Rothermere, Lord, 93 Roubini, Nouriel, 207, 254 Rousseff, Dilma, 258 Rucellai, Giovanni, 21 Rueff, Jacques, 85, 91, 115‡, 251 Ruskin, John, 180–81 Sainsbury’s (British grocery chain), 160 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of, 50–51, 52, 57 Samuelson, Paul, 246–7 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 292 Savills (property consultants), 174 saving: bonus of compound interest, 190; China’s savings glut, 268–9; as deferred gratification, 29, 188–90; and interest, xxiv, 44, 77, 188–93, 194–9, 205–6; interest as ‘wages of abstinence’, xxiv, xxv, 188–91; savings glut hypothesis, 115–16, 117, 126, 128–9, 132, 191, 252; Terborgh on, 125* savings & loan crisis, US, 111, 145 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 99 Sbrancia, Maria Belen, 290 Scandinavian banking crisis (early 1990s), 136 Schacht, Hjalmar, 82, 92, 312 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 299 Scheidel, Walter, 204 Schumpeter, Joseph, 16, 32, 46, 95, 218; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), 126, 140, 296–7; ‘creative destruction’ idea, xx, 140–43, 153, 296–7; on deflation, 100; History of Economic Analysis, xviii; view of intellectuals, 297 Schwartz, Anna, 98, 99, 105, 116 Schwarzman, Steven, 207 Sears (department store), 169–70 secular stagnation, 77, 124–8, 131, 132–9, 151, 205–6 Sée, Henri Eugene, Modern Capitalism (1928), 28* Seneca the Younger, 20–21 Senior, Nassau, 188, 191 Senn, Martin, 193 shadow banks: in Canada, 174–5; in China, 266, 270, 282*, 283–5, 286; collapse in subprime crisis, 221, 283; illiquid products, 226–7; re-emergence after 2008 crisis, 221, 227, 231, 233; structured finance products, 116, 227, 283–5; Trust companies as precursors of, 84*; types of, 221; ‘Ultra-short’ bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 227 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 27 ‘shareholder value’ philosophy, 163–6, 167, 170–71 Shaw, Edward, 286 Shaw, Leslie, 83, 83* Shiba Inu (cryptocurrency), 308 Shin, Hyun Song, 254, 263 Shiyan, Hubei province, 275 Silicon Valley, 148, 151, 173, 176, 204 Silver, Morris, 7, 11 Singer, Paul, 185, 246 Smith, Adam, 14, 174; on monopolies, 162, 298; view of interest, 27, 27*, 31, 183; on wealth, 181; The Wealth of Nations (1776), xxii, 27–8, 27*, 31 Smithers, Andrew, Productivity and the Bonus Culture (2019), 152* Smoot–Hawley Act (1930), 261 socialism, 188, 297, 298 Soddy, Frederick, 181, 242 Solon the ‘Lawgiver’, 9, 18 Solow, Bob, 128 Somary, Felix, 94–5, 308 Sombart, Werner, Modern Capitalism, 22* Soros, George, 148*, 273, 283 South Africa, 258 South America: loans/securities from, 77, 79–80; precious metals from, 49, 168; speculation in bonds from, 64, 65–6, 91; trade during Napoleonic Wars, 70 South Korea, 267 South Sea Bubble (1720), 62, 65*, 68, 69, 307 Soviet Union, 278 Spain, 144–5, 147, 168, 213, 253, 279; mortgage bonds (cédulas), 117 Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), 307 speculative manias, xxiii; Borio on, 135; and cryptocurrencies, 177–9; ‘hyperbolic discounting’ during, 176–7; in period from 1630s to 1840s, 64–6, 67–72, 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 79–80; technology companies in post-crisis years, 176–9; before Wall Street Crash (1929), 91 see also Mississippi bubble Spencer, Grant, 177 Sraffa, Piero, 42 St Ambrose, 18 St Augustine, 18–19, 202 St Bonaventure, 19 Stable Money League/Association, 87, 96 Standard Oil, 157 state capitalism, 280, 284, 292–5, 297, 298 Stefanel (Italian clothing company), 147 Stein, Jeremy, 231, 233 Steuart, Sir James, 53, 273 ‘sticky prices’ theory, 87* Strong, Benjamin, 82–3, 86–8, 90*, 92, 93, 98, 112 Stuckey’s Bank, 63, 66–7 subprime mortgage crisis, xxii, 114, 116, 117–18, 131, 211, 292; produces ‘dash for cash’, 227; unwinding of carry trades during, 221, 227 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, 12 Suez Canal, 78 Sumerian civilization, 4, 6, 8, 15 Summers, Larry, 124–5, 127, 129, 185, 230, 230*, 235, 302 Sumner, William Graham, ‘Forgotten Man’, xx, xxii, 198 Susa, Henry of, 25 Svensson, Lars, 247 Sweden, 174, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247, 294 Sweezy, Paul, 156 Swiss National Bank, 172–3, 293–4 Switzerland, 172, 174, 226, 233, 241, 244, 245 Sydney (Australia), 175 Sylla, Richard, 4, 11, 68, 109 Tacitus, 20–21 Tasker, Peter, 271 Tawney, R.H., 201 tax structures, 164; offshore tax havens, 210 Taylor, John, 116–17, 129, 252 Tencent, 283 Tencin, Claudine Alexandrine Guérin, Madame de, 51 Terborgh, George, 125–6, 127 Tesla, 176–7 Theranos, 149 Thiel, Peter, 263 Third Avenue (investment company), 227–8 Thornton, Daniel, 192 Thornton, Henry, 41–2, 66*, 70, 75 Thornton, Henry Sykes, 66* Tiberius, Roman Emperor, 12 time, concept of, xviii; and act of saving, 188–90; canonical ‘hours’, 21; and Lewis Carroll, 309; in era of ultra-low interest rates, 59, 177; Franklin on, xviii, 22, 28; and Hayek, 32; interest as ‘time value of money’, xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 10, 14–15, 16, 20, 22, 26–7, 28–32; Lord King’s ‘paradox of policy’, 194, 230*; the Marshmallow Test, 29, 189; and medieval scholars, 19–20; Renaissance writings on, 21; secularization of, 21–2; speculators’ misunderstanding of, 59; and thought in ancient world, 20–21; time as individual’s possession, 20, 21, 25; ‘time in production’, xxiv, 14–15, 16, 22, 95, 95†, 141; ‘time preference’ theory, xxiv*, 28–32, 42, 95, 188–9; Thomas Wilson’s ideas, 26–7, 28, 30 Time-Warner, 167 Tooke, Thomas, 69 Toporowski, Jan, 167 Torrens, Robert, 66 Toys ‘R’ Us, 169 trade and commerce: in ancient world, 6, 7–8, 12, 14, 15; Atlantic trade, 59; business partnerships (commenda, societas), 26; commercial classes/interests, 35, 36–7, 38–40, 41, 43, 44, 66–7; commercial importance of time, xviii, 15–16, 21, 22; emergence of modern trade cycle, 62–4; expansion of in Middle Ages, 19, 21–3, 25–6; international trade, 6, 15, 23, 24, 59, 252–3, 261–2; and Italian Renaissance, 21; in medieval Italy, 21–3; mercantile/shipping loans, 6, 12, 14, 22–3, 26, 219 TransAmerica Life Insurance, 199* Trichet, Jean-Claude, 239 Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, 73 Truman, Harry, 84 The Truman Show (Peter Weir film, 1998), 185–7 Trump, Donald, 185, 261, 262, 291–2, 299, 304, 310 trusts/monopolies: in early twentieth century Europe, 159; Lenin on, 159–60; merger ‘tsunami’ after 2008 crisis, 160–63, 161*, 168–70, 182–3, 237, 298; ‘platform companies’, 161; Adam Smith on, 162, 298; in US robber baron era, 156, 157–9, 203 tulip mania (1630s), 68 Tunisia, 255 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques, 15, 28–9, 30, 218 Turkey, xxiii, 252, 258–60, 263 Turkmenistan, 262 Turner, Adair, 292 TXU (energy company), 162 Uber, 149, 150 ‘unicorn’ start-up companies, 148–50, 153, 155, 173, 176–7 Union Pacific Railroad, 157, 158 United States: as bubble economy, 184–7; credit expansion of 1920s, 87–91, 92–4, 96–8, 112, 203; Democrats’ Green New Deal policy, 302; economic expansion (1929–41), 143; economy in Bretton Woods era, 291, 302; financial crisis (1873), 157; foreign securities/loans in 1920s, 91; inflation in 1970s, 108–9; Knickerbocker Panic (1907), 83–4; large-scale immigration into, 78; loan of farm animals in, 4; long-term interest rates (1945–2021), 134; loss of manufacturing jobs to China, 261*, 261; low economic vitality in post-crisis decade, 124, 150–53, 191; monetary policy in 1900s, 83–4, 83*; post-Second World War recovery, 126; public debt today, 291–2, 291*; recessions of early 1980s, 109–10, 151; reversal of global capital flows (late-1920s), 93; robber baron era, 156–9, 203; shift from manufacturing towards services, 167–8, 182; and zombification, 146, 152–3, 155 see also Federal Reserve, US United States Steel Corporation, 157–8 Universities Superannuation Scheme, UK, 196 Useless Ethereum Token, 178 usury: attacked from left and right, 17; attitudes to in ancient world, 17–18, 19, 20–21, 219; in Britain, 24, 26–7, 34, 40, 42, 65‡, 65; Church law forbids, 18–19, 23–4; definitions in Elizabethan era, 26–7; etymology of word, 5; Galiani on, 218–19, 220, 221; and Jews, 18; Marx on, 16, 200–201; medieval Church acknowledges risk, 25–6; Old Testament restrictions on, 17; Proudhon-Bastiat debate on, xvii–xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 9; in Renaissance world, 22–3; scholastic attack on, 18–20, 23–4, 25 Valeant Pharmaceuticals, 161, 168–9 Vancouver, 175 Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), 158, 159, 166 Velde, François, 58*, 59 Venice, 22, 23 Vinci, Leonardo da, Salvator Mundi, 208–9 VIX index, 228–9, 254 La Voix du Peuple, xvii–xix volatility, 153, 228–30, 233, 234, 254, 304, 305 Volcker, Paul, 108–9, 121, 145, 184, 240 Voltaire, 57 Wainwright, Oliver, 209 Waldman, Steve, 206 Waldorf Astoria, New York, 285–6 Wall Street Crash (October 1929): Fed’s response to, 98, 100, 101, 108; Fisher and Keynes fail to foresee, 94–5; Hayek’s interpretation of, 101, 105; low real rates in 1920s USA, 87–91, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 203; low/stable inflation at time of, 134; monetarist view of, 98–9, 101, 105, 108; predictions/warnings of, 93–5, 96, 101, 105, 308; reversal of international capital flows (late-1920s), 93, 93*, 261 WallStreetBets, 307, 309 Walpole, Horace, 62–3 Warburg, Paul, 94 Warsh, Kevin, 228 wealth: ‘Buddenbrooks effect’, 216; conspicuous consumption by mega-rich, 54–5, 208–10, 212; definitions of, 179–82, 216; elite displays as signs of inequality, 209–10, 212; virtual wealth bubbles, 179, 180, 181–2, 185, 193–5, 206, 215, 216–17, 217†, 229–30, 237; wealth illusion, 193–5, 198 Welch, Jack, 170, 171 Wells, H.


Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

In the 1960s there were damaging leads and lags in international payments as well as playing with currency exchange variations. In fact, there were several national currency ‘collapses’ influenced by such action (for example, Canada 1962, Italy 1963, Britain 1964, France 1968, USA 1973 and so on).106 Tax avoidance by various means also plays a significant role. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a flurry of ‘tax havens’ set up abroad, which 30 years later were still hurting national budgets. E. Discovering the New Technologies Yet there is one very important phenomenon which, together with the impulse given to the catching-up processes, is the positive result of the dispersion of financial capital in search of profitable opportunities in this twilight of the established paradigm.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

This scandalous situation angers the public and has led many politicians on both sides of the aisle to advocate for tax reform. Unsurprisingly, there is little consensus about the details of such reform. Some suggest that tax authorities need to be tougher on corporations, forcing them to close the complex legal loopholes that reduce their tax liabilities and repatriate profits earned in tax havens abroad. Others focus on the relatively high nominal tax rate and suggest that lowering the nominal rate would be the strongest incentive to get corporations to comply. Regardless of one’s political predilections, it is very clear that from a distributive perspective, the soaring profits enjoyed by some US companies need to be balanced by a substantial rise in tax receipts from these corporations.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

Usually, as we’ve seen, they’re focused on making money. However, their profits are tightly linked to government policies. The government regulates them, or chooses not to, approves or blocks their mergers and acquisitions, and sets their tax policies (often turning a blind eye to the billions parked in offshore tax havens). This is why tech companies, like the rest of corporate America, inundate Washington with lobbyists and quietly pour hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions into the political system. Now they’re gaining the wherewithal to fine-tune our political behavior—and with it the shape of American government—just by tweaking their algorithms.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

The early 1990s was a thriving period for such shadow elites crossing public, private, and international networks. Privatization con artists flourished, such as Viktor Kozeny, a Czech émigré who fleeced thousands of his native citizens of their stock vouchers promising 1,000 percent returns, only to hide the money in offshore tax havens. Around the same time, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) effectively outsourced its Russia policy to the Harvard Institute of International Development, which brokered loans as if it were a U.S. government agency. From Bruce Jackson, the Lockheed Martin vice president who as head of the U.S.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

Indeed, as top Kennedy advisor Walter Heller explained (and it was as if revenue-obsessed supply-siders were whispering to him as early as the 1960s), economy-boosting tax cuts generate “a better economic setting for financing a more generous program of federal expenditures.”12 Supply-side has unwittingly paired aspects of itself with government-expanding Keynesianism. The late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman didn’t get everything right on the economic front, as future chapters will reveal. However, he was quite correct in asserting that when tax cuts lead to higher federal revenues, taxes haven’t been cut enough.13 The Laffer curve, which correctly asserts that a lower rate of taxation leads to greater growth and higher federal revenues, is a tautological reality, as the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s make plain. At the same time, it’s well past time to consign the Laffer curve to the proverbial dustbin of history.


pages: 249 words: 77,027

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul M. Barrett

airport security, forensic accounting, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

By inflating costs to the American subsidiary, this practice decreased the profits the subsidiary was required to report to the US Internal Revenue Service. The court in Luxembourg did not show any interest in enforcing the tax laws of other countries—hardly surprising, given that Luxembourg’s economy rests on its reputation as a tax haven. The court was trying to sort out whether Ewert had a legitimate claim to Unipatent and half of Glock’s lucrative US unit. Once the Luxembourg judiciary concluded that, on the contrary, Ewert was an embezzler and failed murderer, it left the propriety of Glock’s tax-minimization strategies to others.


pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Sinha, Mas, and other mobile-money enthusiasts aren’t nonchalant about these concerns, but they warn against creating unwarranted paranoia and against thinking too narrowly about what constitutes security. For example, limiting transfer amounts is an easy first step for deterring widespread abuse of these systems. Remember, target customers are people like Kumar, the electronics repairman, not millionaires who already have plenty of access to financial services, tax havens, and sophisticated methods of laundering their money. Enterprising terrorists could easily end-run this transfer maximum, though, by having many people direct funds to a single operative. To prevent that from happening, the system could also have a maximum amount that can be received into a single account in a given time.


pages: 288 words: 76,343

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity by Paul Collier

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, business climate, carbon tax, Doha Development Round, energy security, food miles, G4S, Global Witness, information asymmetry, Kenneth Arrow, megacity, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, search costs, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons

In any event, beyond the G5, it gets harder because each of the other countries in the world could reasonably adopt a strategy of free-riding, and if they all did so the consequences would be dire. Worse, these countries have an incentive not simply to free-ride, but actively to undermine the efforts of others. Analogous to tax havens, it is to their individual advantage to provide carbon havens in which emissions are unrestricted. If this happens, the carbon-emitting industries would simply shift to these locations. The G5 would have reduced their emissions, but not global emissions. And as this happened the political will to incur the costs of reducing emissions might easily evaporate even among the G5.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

It has made sure only thirty-six of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in thirty different countries. This arrangement allows Halliburton to lower its tax liability on foreign income by establishing a “controlled foreign corporation” and subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries used as tax havens. Thus the corporations take our money. They squander it. They cleverly evade taxation. And our corporate government not only funds them but protects them. The financial and political disparities between our oligarchy and the working class have created a new global serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimate that the number of subprime foreclosures in the United States by the end of 2012 will total 1,390,000.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

She believes that such profiteering will almost surely grow with the new infrastructure bank, which the Trudeau government has said will expand opportunities for private equity. This suggests that our infrastructure will increasingly be owned by unknown players reaping enormous speculative gains at our expense and accumulating those gains, beyond our reach, in offshore tax havens. All this raises huge questions about the wisdom of allowing Wall Street to be involved in the financing of our infrastructure. We might be willing to take such a gamble if there was no other option. But, as noted, Canadian governments have a long history of financing infrastructure largely by borrowing from the public — that is, raising money by selling government bonds or treasury bills to individual Canadians as well as to Canadian pension funds.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

In effect the recipients of transfer payments and subsidies became student employees of government who were able to dispense with the bother of reporting every day to work.13 The answer, of course, is to do away with mass democracy. Davidson and Rees-Mogg set out to show how to become a Sovereign Individual: one who can dictate to government, rather than being dictated to. (Their answer is principally through aggressive tax avoidance, playing off multiple tax havens against one another to get an acceptable deal.) Once enough wealthy people have become sovereign individuals, coerced redistribution will have to end. At this point, governments will have no choice but to dismantle the welfare state. Tyler Cowen, Economics Professor at George Mason University, set out his vision of a free market ‘hyper-meritocracy’ in which poor people will be forced to move to low-cost housing and to accept vastly reduced support, pacified by computer games and digital media: The American polity [political system] is unlikely to collapse, but we’ll all look back on the immediate post-war era as a very special time.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

GAW Miners also sold customers “virtual miners,” or “Hashlets,” for future mining profits, which to the SEC appeared like securities. In 2018, Garza was sentenced to 21 months in prison for wire fraud. Mark Scott Acted as an attorney for OneCoin, a Ponzi scheme that generated billions in revenue. Scott was responsible for laundering $400 million of revenue through tax havens. OneCoin was a multilevel marketing operation that has seen prosecutions globally over false claims of its private blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Sentencing is still ongoing. Block.One Operated an unregistered securities offering via an ICO from June 2017 to June 2018. During that time the SEC released its DAO report, which covered a previous unregistered security offering in the cryptocurrency space as guidance for operators.


pages: 241 words: 75,417

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

“If you want to be stupid,” he told Trump, “then I can be stupid, as well.”25 The transatlantic trade truce reflected Macron’s conviction that Europe can make its voice heard when dealing with the United States, China, and Russia only from a position of strength. Macron has been a driving force in prodding the European Union to ensure that American technology giants like Amazon and Facebook pay their fair share of taxes in the countries where they operate, rather than be allowed to siphon off their profits into tax havens. A French law, which Macron wanted to see adopted by other European nations, was passed in 2019 that imposed a 3 percent tax on digital service companies whose global revenues surpass $800 million. That measure, which targeted about two dozen companies, predominantly American, enabled the French government to collect more than $500 million in extra taxes.


Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

The entire world is pretty much run by a network of banks so the whole question of Europe is largely about whether or not we want access to a slightly wider range of cheeses. One reason for its importance politically is that it’s a kind of last refuge of racism. Not a lot of those anti-Europeans want us to leave Europe so we can join Africa. The other reason is that the City of London is essentially a big tax haven. We launder a lot of the world’s stolen loot here in Britain, and our politicians view Europe as regulation. The general attitude is that of a pirate ship being asked to sign up to regular health and safety inspections. I’m in the happy position of hating both anti-Europeans and most of Europe.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Enacted in full, it would constitute a significant step back towards the fragmented political landscape of city-states that once prevailed. It is an unrealistic idea. Independent city-states like Singapore and Dubai have thrived as connecting points in global trade networks. Others, like Luxembourg, have benefited by operating as tax havens. That is not a scalable model for the global economy. It is also not the way to resolve the grave challenges currently confronting the world. What we need is multiple layers of government – local, national and multilateral – acting in concert with one another. In a 1987 interview with Woman’s Own magazine, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher once declared: ‘There is no such thing as society’, only ‘individual men and women and families’.12 We beg to differ.


pages: 244 words: 78,238

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

Sharon and Lance were alone and getting sicker. MARCH 31 Washington, D.C. On land, a wall of political opposition seemed to coalesce in unison against the Zaandam. From the White House, word filtered out that certain cabinet members were incensed that the cruise lines paid no taxes in the United States and were based in tax havens, including the Cayman Islands and Panama. The word from President Trump was hard to fathom, as well. One day, the president defended cruising as an industry in need of saving, and the next he countered that he didn’t want the infection numbers to rise in the United States. Letting infected cruise ships enter U.S. ports—even with sick U.S. citizens on board—might alter public perception about the spread of what he had mocked as a weak virus.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Between 1987 and 2013, the wealth of the super-rich—a rarified group defined as the richest 1 in 20 million or 1 in 100 million people on earth—enjoyed mean annual growth of 6 percent, compared to 2 percent for the globally average adult. Moreover, it has been estimated that 8 percent of the world’s financial household wealth is currently being held in offshore tax havens and that much of it goes unrecorded. Considering that the rich are bound to disproportionately engage in this practice and that the estimated percentage for U.S. assets (4 percent) is much lower than that for Europe (10 percent), the actual degree of wealth concentration in notionally more egalitarian European countries may well be considerably higher than tax records suggest.

New York: Columbia University Press. Zuckerman, Edward. 1984. The day after World War III. New York: Avon. Zucman, Gabriel. 2013. “The missing wealth of nations: are Europe and the US net debtors or net creditors?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128: 1321–1364. Zucman, Gabriel. 2015. The hidden wealth of nations: the scourge of tax havens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. INDEX absolute inequality, 13, 434 Abdullah, Abdul Jabbar, 374 Abul-Magd, Adel Y., 267n13 Adams, Robert McC, 279n32 Akkadians, 56–57, 280 Albertus, Michael, 352n11, 354n13, 357, 359n22, 394n6 Alexander II, 348 Alexander the Great, 194 Alfani, Guido, 92n9, 98n17, 111n36, 306, 307n26, 308n27 Alien Landownership Act, 355 Alliance for Peace, 352 American Civil War, 7, 17, 109, 174–75, 176, 177, 204, 244, 264n8; black suffrage, 168; Confederacy, 175, 176; destruction of slavery, 361; material inequality, 179; mobilization, 181, 208; Union Army, 175, 176; wealth, 111 Amsterdam, 93–95, 300–1 Anand, Sudhir, 10n7 Angkor, 278 Antonine Plague, 326–30, 329n19, 333 Apiones family, 79 Argentina, 133–34, 144, 156, 380, 382–84, 386, 397 Argos, 252 Aristophanes, 251 Aristotle, 199n35 Ashur, 200 Ashurbanipal (king), 61 Assyrians, 60–61, 199–200, 270 Athens, 84–85, 192–98, 244, 251 Atkinson, Anthony, 12n9, 13n10, 15n12, 21n18, 107n30, 108n32, 138n4, 363n27, 434n12, 435, 436 Augsburg, 93, 201–2, 335–41 Australia, 133, 136, 142, 364, 405–6 Austria, 147, 406, 409, 428 Austro-Hungary, 141–42, 146, 151, 154, 349 Aztec period, 53, 54, 58–59, 82, 103, 103n25, 241, 315, 317, 319, 319n6 Babylonia, 48, 280, 334–35 Babylonian Theodicy, 59n47 Bagaudae, 245, 245n20 Barfield, Thomas J., 64n5 barter, 218 Baten, Jorg, 151n24 Battle of Britain, 170 Battle of Changping, 184 Battle of Mello, 247 Battle of Nördlingen, 339 Belgium, 154–55, 168, 246–47, 406 Bercé, Yves-Marie, 246n21, 250–51, 253 Bergh, Andreas, 162n41 Berkowitz, Edward, 170 Bertola, Luis, 110n35 Béthune, Maximilien de, 83 Beveridge, William, 171 Beveridge Report, 379 “billionaire class,” 3, 4 billionaires, 1, 2, 3, 4, 19n16; China, 2n3; Forbes World’s Billionaires, 71; Russia, 222 Bischoff, Kendra, 20n17 Black Death, 18, 90, 91n6, 93, 94, 96, 112, 291–313, 293n2, 333, 335, 341, 375, 390, 397, 442; Byzantine, 303; cultivation patterns, 329; eastern European countries, 311; elites, 310; end of Middle Ages, 111; England, 299, 342, 394n6; Europe, 297; famines, 331–32; “First,” 326; fourteenth century, 319; impact, 297; income, 101; initial wave, 332; Italy, 313; Justinianic Plague, 325; labor costs, 247, 302; labor supply, 248; late medieval Europe, 324, 336; late medieval pandemic 293–313; Lorenz curves, 308; Mamluk Egypt, 312; mid-fourteenth century, 314; mortality, 304, 307–8, 316; New World, 316; Ottoman, 303; population, 298; real wages, 4, 304; Tuscani, 308n28; western Europe, 318, 326, 330, 341; wheat wages, 324 “bloodlands,” 155 Blum, Jerome, 311 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 296 Boehm, Christopher, 26n1, 28n4, 29n6 Boix, Carles, 30n8, 85n36, 267n12 Bolivia, 243, 276–78, 382–84, 387 Bolsheviks, 215, 216, 223, 396 Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique, 37n20 Borsch, Stuart J., 312n33 Botswana, 371 Bourbon family, 84, 238 bourgeoisie, 96, 216, 220, 226, 232, 234, 291 Bourguignon, Francois, 21, 21n19, 412n7, 414n11, 433–34 Bowles, Samuel, 27n3, 39, 434n12 Brazil, 361, 380, 382, 384–85 Britain, 4, 19, 59, 89–90, 97–98, 100, 104–5, 130, 132–33, 135, 137–43, 145–48, 165–66, 168, 170–71, 200–1, 247–50, 267–69, 292, 296–306, 311, 331, 346, 360, 366, 373, 394, 405–6, 413, 421, 425, 428, 434–35, 437, 447, 450–52 British Empire, 116, 422 British Labour Party Manifesto, 145 Bronze Age, 88, 188; collapse, 188; Greece, 59, 277, 342; Late, 281; Late Mediterranean, 270–79; Mycenaean Late, 87 bubonic plague, 88, 267, 293, 394, 320 Buffett, Warren, 2 Buke, Iikim, 82n32 Bulgaria, 249, 349–50 Bullion, Claude de, 84 bullying, 25, 26n1 Buzhilova, Alexandra P., 31n10 Cairo, 312, 324 Cambodia, 230, 254, 278, 347 Canada, 130–31, 133, 135–37, 142, 145–46, 150, 168, 364, 405–6 Capac, Huayna, 316 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 242 Caribbean, 315, 360 Carnegie, Andrew, 176 Carneiro, Robert, 44 Carolingian expansion, 88–89 Carthage, 186–87 Catal Höyük, 15, 39 causation, 33n13, 166n49, 223, 392 Central Powers, 215 Chao, Huang, 262 Charles III, 355 Charles V, 58 Cheverny, Dufourt de, 236 Chile, 156, 352, 380, 382, 384 China, 2–3, 53, 63–71, 102–3, 155, 168, 182–86, 223–28, 231, 238–40, 243–44, 250, 253, 260–64, 330–31, 357, 377, 410–11, 420, 424 Chronicle of the Priory of Rochester, 298 Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, 252, 253 Chumash, 34 city-states, 45, 97, 270, 274; revolts, 251–52 civil wars, 7, 11, 17, 20, 74, 117, 156, 202–7, 213, 258, 356, 373n7, 440; Argos, 251–52; China, 204; communists, 216–18, 225; developing countries, 283; development, 204n44; Germany, 350; Guatemala, 380; Nepal, 440; Peru, 352; profiteers, 176; Roman empire, 206–9; Russia, 205, 216–18, 225; Rwanda, 203; Spain, 349; Switzerland, 168; see also American Civil War; Spanish Civil War Claessen, Henry J.


pages: 613 words: 200,826

Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles by Michael Gross

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, Donald Trump, estate planning, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, Henry Singleton, Irwin Jacobs, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, passive investing, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, Right to Buy, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

Ghazi Aita “was a very elusive dude,” said Greg Hagins, who ran the estate for him and lived there for twenty-one years. Indeed, Aita didn’t buy the house from Chase and Ralph Mishkin himself; it was purchased in July 1978 by Magdalenian Investment NV, an investment advisory firm based in the Caribbean tax haven, the Netherlands Antilles. Though he lived in Holmby Hills for fourteen years, few who encountered him there are sure who Ghazi Aita was or how he made his fortune. His mark on the public record is similarly mysterious: One of the few places his name comes up is on the website of the tiny Republic of San Marino, where he is listed as one of its ambassadors-at-large, appointed in 1998.

Despite their claims and a program announced in 2008 to go carbon negative, environmentalists were taking aim at FIJI’s squat, square bottles. Mother Jones, the anticorporate investigative magazine, blasted FIJI and the Resnicks for “typhoid outbreaks that plague Fijians because of the island’s faulty water supplies,” the company’s tax-free status on Fiji, its alleged sheltering of assets in tax havens like the Cayman Islands where its trademarks are registered, its Luxembourg corporate headquarters, and “the fact that its signature bottle is made from Chinese plastic in a diesel-fueled plant and hauled thousands of miles to its eco-conscious consumers. And, of course, you won’t find mention of the military junta for which FIJI Water is a major source of global recognition and legitimacy.”


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

The components stream in, from Chinese mines, Japanese studios, and American chip fabs, to contractors’ immense manufacturing plants and settlements in multiple nations (notably, and notoriously, China), and then on to Apple stores, both brick and mortar and online. Meanwhile, the billions in earnings from the sale of these products follow their own circuitous routes back to a network of tax havens, including Ireland. The result is a gargantuan profit and luxury margins at the scale of a low-cost producer. Apple is one of the most profitable firms in history, but it doesn’t need to endure the nuisance of U.S. tax rates. 5. Price Premium High prices signal quality and exclusivity.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

As one commentator pointed out, the Panama Papers showed that the US could afford a basic income because they revealed the extent to which the rich were avoiding tax.23 The Tax Justice Network has estimated that the global elite has between $21 trillion and $32 trillion stashed in zero- or low-tax jurisdictions, depriving countries of $190 billion to $280 billion in revenues.24 Meanwhile, they are receiving a lot of ‘something for nothing’, since they gain from public infrastructure and services, property rights conferred on them by government and international regulations, and so on. Separately, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reckons that the shifting of profits to tax havens by multinationals has led to lost government revenues of $600 billion a year. A PROFESSOR’S TEASER Here is an interesting teaser from Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw, in a blog post entitled ‘A quick note on a universal basic income’.25 Consider an economy in which average income is $50,000 but with much income inequality.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

And so far that has been clear: America is the calm, safe-haven country, with clear blue skies, clean air, freedom of speech, and a reliable currency. That’s great, but it is also a static picture of calm and predictability. On the global stage, safety is becoming more and more the American niche, and it is no surprise that America is now seen as one of the world’s leading bank and tax havens. Some brief biographies bring out the differences between America and China when it comes to dynamism, mobility, and complacency. Jack Ma, who became the richest man in China in 2014, started off life really, really poor. He was born in 1964 into extremely unfavorable family circumstances. His grandfather had been an officer in the Nationalist Party, and thus he was persecuted by the Chinese Communists.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Once you become a U.S. citizen, you will have to pay taxes on your worldwide income, even if you live overseas. And it is not easily reversible, so you lose the optionality. But other Western countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, allow their citizens considerable exemptions if they reside in some tax haven. This invites a collection of people to “buy” a citizenship via investments and minimum residence, get the passport, then go live somewhere tax-free. A country should not tolerate fair-weather friends. There is something offensive in having a nationality without skin in the game, just to travel and pass borders, without the downside that comes with the passport.


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Appendix HOW WE CHOSE COUNTRIES FOR OUR INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS First, we obtained a list of the 50 richest countries in the world from the World Bank. The report we used was published in 2004 and is based on data from 2002. Then we excluded countries with populations below 3 million, because we didn’t want to include tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Monaco. And we excluded countries without good information on income inequality, such as Iceland. That left us with 23 rich countries: CALCULATING THE INDEX OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS Not all of the countries in our data set had data for all the health and social problems listed on p. 19, but 21 of them had data on at least 8 of the 9.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

“Apple’s Foreign Cash Hoard Piles Up: $54 Billion and Rapidly Growing,” MacDailyNews, January 11, 2012, http://macdailynews.com/2012/01/11/apples-foreign-cash-hoard-piles-up-54-billion-and-rapidly-growing; Peter Burrows, “Apple Avoids $9.2 Billion in Taxes With Debt Deal,” Bloomberg, May 3, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-02/apple-avoids-9-2-billion-in-taxes-with-debt-deal.html. 121. Jennifer Liberto, “Offshore Havens Saved Microsoft $7B in Taxes—Senate Panel,” CNN Money, September 20, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/20/technology/offshore-tax-havens/index.html. 122. Lanier, Who Owns the Future? p. 10. 123. Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” New York Times, January 26, 2012. 124. Ibid. 125. Hamilton Nolan, “Hubris, High Socks, and other Habits of the Most Powerful People in the World,” Gawker, December 13, 2012, http://gawker.com/5968116/hubris-high-socks-and-other-habits-of-the-most-powerful-people-in-the-world; Chris Benner, “Win the Lottery or Organize: Traditional and non-Traditional Labor Organizing in Silicon Valley,” Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 12, 1997/1998, December 8, 1997; Jack Ewing, “Amazon’s Labor Relations Under Scrutiny in Germany,” New York Times, March 4, 2013; Brad Stone, “Amazon May Get Its First Labor Union in the U.S.,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 17, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-17/amazon-may-get-its-first-labor-union-in-the-u-dot-s. 126.


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The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System by Philip Augar

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, deal flow, equity risk premium, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, information retrieval, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, new economy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, systematic bias, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, yield curve

The Financial Times summed up the situation as follows: ‘Parmalat abused the capital markets for years by raising money under false pretences. Money was siphoned off for family purposes and the whole mess hidden in a complex structure of 200-plus subsidiaries and special purpose vehicles scattered across the globe, including in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, the Dutch Antilles and Cyprus.’48 Although scarcely a quarter went by without a new derivatives loss emerging, it is important to balance this by remembering that the latest recession and bear market passed off without any large scale bank failure. The financial services system showed itself able to absorb great volatility and kept working throughout, in part because derivatives helped institutions to ride the volatility.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Deborah Hardoon, Sophia Ayele and Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped, Oxfam Briefing Paper 210 (Oxford, UK: Oxfam, 2016), https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/592643/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-en.pdf;jsessionidÄF4C1C3DFBF17624D6DB7F9305F0D36?sequenceG. 9. Top 100 economies: Duncan Green, “The World’s Top 100 Economies: 31 Countries; 69 Corporations,” People, Spaces, Deliberation blog (The World Bank), 20 September 2016, https://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/world-s-top-100-economies-31-countries-69-corporations. 10.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The Isle of Man is self-governing, with the United Kingdom responsible only for foreign policy and defense. It isn’t even part of the European Union, which means the British are moving toward imitating the Manx. The Manx are loyal subjects of Elizabeth II, Lord of Mann. Once rural and poor, dependent on fishing and farming, today the Isle of Man is a banking center (or tax haven, if you’re more cynical about it). The population is 88,000; the combination of ancient isolation and recent affluence has made the island attractive to investors and newcomers. But lately, the growth of the working population has flattened, and the island government is pushing hard to attract new workers.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

These companies have acquired monopoly status in the markets they have themselves largely created, with negative consequences for employment and consumers who need to eventually pay monopoly prices.101 Furthermore, these companies have heavily engaged in tax avoidance tactics by moving their fiscal address to countries with low levels of taxation (e.g. Ireland and Luxembourg) and amassing huge cash reserves in fiscal havens. It has been reported that Apple alone has over $200 billion stashed away in tax havens.102 The digital revolution has also contributed to significantly worsening working conditions around the world as has been documented by Nick Dyer-Whiteford in Cyber-proletariat.103 It is true that if one looks at the shining top of the digital economy, one will see the cropping up of highly qualified and highly paid jobs, from software development and engineering to marketing, community management and Web design, sometimes working in pretentious ‘campuses’ with lounges, sport facilities and the like.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

., 120–21 business zones, 150 ‘Butskellism’, 49* Cadbury, 77 Cameron, David, 205 Canada, 22 capitalism competition, 21, 25, 56, 85, 86 ‘creative destruction’ concept, 21 current failings of, 4–5, 17, 25, 42, 45–6, 48, 201, 212–13 and decline of social trust, 5, 45–6, 48, 55, 59, 69 as essential for prosperity, 4–5, 18, 20, 25, 201 and families, 37 first mover advantage, 148 and greed, 10, 19, 25–7, 28, 31, 42, 58, 69, 70†, 81, 95 and Marx’s alienation, 17–18 and oppositional identities, 56, 74 vested interests, 85, 86, 135–6, 207 see also firms Catalan secession movement, 58 causality, narrative of, 33, 34 CDC Group, 122, 149* Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, 129 Chicago, University of, 166 childhood adoption, 110–11 children in ‘care’, 104, 105, 110, 111, 157 children ‘reared by wolves’, 31–2 cognitive development, 105–6, 170, 175–6 fostering, 104, 105, 111 identity acquisition, 32 impact of parental unemployment, 160–61 learning of norms, 33, 35, 107–8 non-cognitive development, 105, 163, 169–70, 171–3, 174, 175–6 ‘rights of the child’ concept, 103–4 in single-parent families, 101, 102, 104–5, 155, 160 trusted mentors, 169–70 see also family China, 118–19, 149, 203 Chira, Susan, 52–3 Chirac, Jacques, 14, 120–21 Christian Democratic parties, 5, 14 Citigroup, 186 Clark, Gregory, The Son Also Rises, 106–8 Clarke, Ken, 206 class divide assortative mating among new elite, 99–100, 154, 188–9 author’s proposed policies, 19–20, 21, 183–4, 187–8, 190, 207–8 and breadth of social networks, 169 and Brexit vote, 5, 196 and cognitive development, 105–6 divergence dynamic, 7, 18, 48, 98–108, 154–61, 170–71, 172–80, 181–90 ‘elite’ attitudes to less-well educated, 4, 5, 12, 16, 53, 59, 60–61, 63 and family life, 20, 98, 99–106, 157–62 and fracture to skill-based identities, 3–5, 51–6, 78 and home ownership, 68, 181, 182–3 need for socially mixed schools, 164–5 and non-cognitive development, 105, 163, 169–70, 171–3, 174, 175–6 and parental hothousing, 100, 101, 105–6 post-school skills development, 170–76 pre-emptive support for stressed families, 20, 155, 157–60, 161–3, 208 and reading in pre-teens, 167–9 and recent populist insurgencies, 5 retirement insecurities, 179–80 and two-parent families, 155–6, 157 unravelling of shared identity, 15, 50, 51–6, 57*, 58–61, 63, 215 see also white working class climate change, 44, 67, 119 Clinton, Hillary, 5, 9, 203–4 coalition government, UK (2010–15), 206 cognitive behavioral therapy, 160 Cold War, 113, 114, 116 end of, 5–6, 115, 203 Colombia, 120 communism, 32, 36–7, 85–6 communitarian values care, 9, 11, 12, 16, 29, 31, 42, 116 fairness, 11, 12, 14, 16, 29, 31, 34, 43, 116, 132–3 hierarchy, 11, 12, 16, 38–9, 43, 99–100 left’s abandonment of, 16, 214* liberty, 11, 12, 16, 42 loyalty, 11, 12, 16, 29, 31, 34, 42–3, 116 new vanguard’s abandonment of, 9, 11–13, 14–15, 16, 17, 49–50, 113, 116–18, 121, 214 post-war settlement, 8–9, 49, 113–16, 122 and reciprocal obligations, 8–9, 11–12, 13, 14, 19, 33, 34, 40–41, 48–9, 201, 212–15 roots in nineteenth-century co-operatives, 8, 13, 14, 201 sanctity, 11, 16, 42–3 Smith and Hume, 21–2† values and reason, 29–30, 43–4 see also belonging, narrative of; obligation, narrative of; reciprocity; social democracy Companies Act, UK, 82 comparative advantage, 20, 120, 192, 194 Confederation of British Industry (CBI), 79 conservatism, 30, 36 Conservative Party, 14, 49, 205, 206 contraception, 98–9, 102 co-operative movement, 8, 13, 14, 201 Corbyn, Jeremy, 202, 204–5 Crosland, Anthony, The Future of Socialism, 17, 18, 19 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 114 debutante balls, 188 Denmark, 63, 178, 214* Descartes, Rene, 31 Detroit, 128, 129, 144 Deutsche Bank, 78, 185 development banks, 149–50 Development Corporations Act (1981), 150 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 108 digital networks detachment of narratives from place, 38, 61–2 economies of scale, 86–7 global e-utilities, 37, 38, 86–7, 89–90, 91 social media, 27, 61, 87, 173, 207, 215 value-based echo-chambers, 38, 61–2, 64–5, 212, 215 Draghi, Mario, 153 Dundee Project, 161–2 Dutch Antilles, 193 East Asia, 147, 192 eBay, 87 economic man, 10, 19, 25, 26–7, 31, 34–5, 196, 209, 210, 215 economic rent theory, 19, 91, 133–9, 140–44, 186–8, 192, 195, 207 education and collapse of social democracy, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 63 and empathy, 12 and European identity, 57* expansion of universities, 99–100, 127 and growth of the middle class, 100 inequality in spending per pupil, 167 mis-ranking of cognitive and non-cognitive training, 174–6 need for socially mixed schools, 164–5 post-school skills development, 170–76 pre-school, 105–6, 163–4 quality of teaching, 165–6 reading in pre-teens, 167–9 and shocks to norms of ethical family, 98, 99–105 symbols of cognitive privilege, 175 teaching methods, 166–7 vocational education, 171–6 zero-sum aspects of success, 189 electoral systems, 206 Emerging Market economies, 129, 130–31 empires, age of, 113 The Enigma of Reason (Mercier and Sperber), 29 enlightened self-interest, 33, 40*, 97–8, 101, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117, 184, 213 Enron, 80 ethnicity, 3, 20, 56, 62, 64, 65, 211 Europe Christian Democrats in, 5, 14 class divides, 3, 4, 5, 125 decline in social trust, 45 and knowledge industries, 192 metropolitan-provincial divides, 3, 4, 125 and migration, 121, 197 and shared identity, 57–8, 64, 66, 125 social democracy in, 8–9, 49, 50 European Central Bank, 153 European Commission, 57 European Investment Bank, 149 European Union (EU, formerly EEC), 66, 67, 114, 115, 116, 117 Brexit vote (June 2016), 5, 125, 131, 196, 215 Eurozone crisis, 153 public policy as predominantly national, 212 universities in, 170 evolutionary theory, 31, 33†, 35–6, 66 externalities, 145–6 Facebook, 87 Fairbairn, Carolyn, 79 fake news, 33–4 family, 19 African norms, 110–11 benefits for single parents, 160 Clark’s ‘family culture’, 107–8 entitled individual vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 equality within, 39, 154 erosion of mutual obligations, 101–2, 210 identity acquisition, 32 ideologies hostile to, 36–7 impact of unemployment/poverty, 4, 7, 160–61 importance of, 36, 37 and increased longevity, 110, 161 in-kind support for parenting, 161 nuclear dynastic family, 102, 110, 154 one-parent families, 101, 102, 104–5, 155, 160 parental hothousing, 100, 101, 105–6 post-1945 ethical family, 97–8, 99–105, 108, 210 pressures on young parents, 159–60, 161–3 and public policy, 21, 154–5, 157–70, 171–3, 177, 209 and reciprocity, 97–8, 101, 102 shocks to post-1945 norms, 98–105 shrinking of extended family, 101–2, 109–10, 161 social maternalism concept, 154–5, 157–8, 190 two-parent families as preferable, 155–6, 157 see also childhood; marriage Farage, Nigel, 202 fascism, 6, 13*, 47, 113 Federalist papers, 82 feminism, 13, 99 Fillon, François, 204 financial crisis, global (2008–9), 4, 34, 71, 160 no bankers sent to gaol for, 95–6 financial sector, 77–9, 80–81, 83–5 asymmetric information, 88, 185 co-ordination role, 145–6 economies of scale, 87 localized past of, 84, 146 toxic rivalries in, 189 trading in financial assets, 78–9, 84, 184–5, 186, 187 Finland, 63 firms, 19, 21, 69 CEO pay, 77–8, 79, 80–81 competition, 21, 25, 56, 85, 86 control/accountability of, 75–81, 82–5 cultures of good corporate behaviour, 94–5 demutualization in UK, 83, 84 deteriorating behaviour of, 18, 69, 78, 80–81 economies of scale, 17–18, 37, 86–7, 88–91, 126–7, 144–5, 146–7 ethical, 70–71, 172, 209–10 and ethical citizens, 93–4, 95, 96 failure/bankruptcy of, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75–6 flattening of hierarchies in, 39 Friedman’s profit nostrum, 69–70, 71, 76, 78–9, 210 global e-utilities, 37, 38, 86–7, 89–90, 91 ideologies hostile to, 37, 81 low productivity-low cost business model, 173–4 ‘maximising of shareholder value’, 69–70, 76, 79, 82–3 ‘mutuals’, 83 need for bankslaughter crime, 95–6 new network features, 86–7 policing the public interest, 93–4 public dislike of, 69, 95–6 public interest representation on boards, 92–3 regulation of, 87–90, 174 reward linked to short-term performance, 77, 78–81 sense of purpose, 39–40, 41, 70–75, 80–81, 93–4, 96 shareholder control of, 76–7, 79, 80, 82–3 societal role of, 81–2, 92–3, 96, 209–10 utility services, 86, 89, 90 worker interests on boards, 83, 84–5 Fisher, Stephen, 196* Five Star, 125 Ford, 70, 71 France, 7, 63, 67, 114 écoles maternelles in, 164 labour market in, 176, 189 pensions policy, 180 presidential election (2017), 5, 9, 204 universities in, 170 working week reduced in, 189 Frederiksen, Mette, 214* Friedman, Milton, 15, 69–70, 71, 76 The Full Monty (film), 7, 129 G20 group, 118 G7 group, 118 G8 group, 194 Ganesh, Janan, 125 Geldof, Bob, 169 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 114, 115, 116–17 General Motors (GM), 72, 73–4, 75, 86, 172 geographic divide, 3, 16, 18, 19, 215 author’s proposed policies, 19, 207 and Brexit vote, 125, 196 broken cities, 4, 7, 19, 48, 125, 129–30, 147–9 business zones, 150 co-ordination problem over new clusters, 145–50, 207 decline of provincial cities, 4, 7, 19, 48, 125, 129–30, 131, 144–5 economic forces driving, 126–30 and education spending, 167 first mover disadvantage, 148–9 ideological responses, 130–32 investment promotion agencies, 150–51 and local universities, 151–2 and metropolitan disdain, 125 need for political commitment, 153 as recent and reversible, 152–3 regenerating provincial cities, 19, 142, 144–50 and spending per school pupil, 167 widening of since 1980, 125 George, Henry, 133–6, 141 Germany 2017 election, 5, 205 local banks in, 146 Nazi era, 57 and oppositional identities, 56–7 oversight of firms in, 76 post-war industrial relations policy, 94–5 and post-war settlement, 114 re-emergence of far right, 5 rights of refugees in, 14 ‘social market economy’, 49 TVET in, 171–2, 174, 175 vereine (civil society groups), 181 worker interests on boards, 84–5 global divide, 7–8, 20, 59–60, 191–8, 208 globalization, 4, 18, 20, 126–7, 128, 129, 130–31, 191–8 Goldman Sachs, 70†, 83–4, 94 Google, 87 Great Depression (1930s), 114 Green, Sir Philip, 80 Grillo, Beppe, 202 ‘Grimm and Co’, Rotherham, 168–9 Gunning, Jan Willem, 165 Haidt, Jonathan, 11–12, 14, 16, 28, 29, 132–3 Haiti, 208 Halifax Building Society, 8, 84 Hamon, Benoît, 9, 204 Harvard-MIT, 7, 152 Hershey, 77 HIV sufferers in poor countries, 120–21 Hofer, Norbert, 202 Hollande, Francois, 9, 204 Hoover, 148 housing market, 181–4 buy-to-let, 182, 183, 184 and lawyers, 187 mortgages, 84, 176, 182, 183–4 proposed stock transfer from landlords to tenants, 184 Hume, David, 14, 21, 21–2†, 29 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (1932), 5 Iceland, 63 Identity Economics, 50–56, 65–7 ideologies based on hatred of ‘other’ part of society, 43, 56, 213, 214 ‘end of history’ triumphalism, 6, 43–4 hostile to families, 36–7 hostile to firms, 37, 81 hostile to the state, 37–8 and housing policy, 183 and migration, 198 New Right, 14–15, 26, 81, 129 norms of care and equality, 116, 132–3 polarization of politics, 38, 63, 202–5 pragmatic eschewal of, 17, 18, 21, 22, 29–30 and principle of reason, 9, 13, 14, 15, 21, 43 Rawlsian vanguard, 13–14, 30, 49–50, 53, 67, 112, 113, 201, 202, 203, 214 return of left-right confrontation, 5, 6, 81, 202–5 and rights, 12–14, 44, 112 seduction of, 6 and twentieth century’s catastrophes, 5–6, 22 views on an ethical world, 112 see also Marxism; rights ideology; Utilitarianism IFC (International Finance Corporation), 122 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), 69–70, 75 India, 118–19 individualism entitled individual vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 fulfilment through personal achievement, 28, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 108–9, 213 New Right embrace of, 14–15, 53, 81, 214–15 as rampant in recent decades, 19, 214–15 reciprocity contrasted with, 44–5 and withering of spatial community, 61–2 industrial revolution, 8, 126 inequality and assortative mating among new elite, 99–100, 154, 188–9 and divergence dynamic, 7, 18, 48, 98–108, 154–61, 170–71, 172–80, 181–90 and financial sector, 185 and geographic divide, 3, 7–8, 20, 125 global divide, 7–8, 20, 59–60, 191–8, 208 persistence of, 106–8 Rawls’ disadvantaged groups, 3–4, 13–14, 16, 50, 53, 121, 203–4, 214 and revolt against social democracy, 15–16 rising levels of, 3–5, 106, 125, 181, 190 and Utilitarian calculus, 132 innovation, 185–6, 208 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 114, 117 international relations achievement of post-WW2 leaders, 113–16, 122 building of shared identity, 114–16 core concepts of ethical world, 112, 113–14 erosion of ethical world, 116–18 expansion of post-war ‘clubs’, 116–18, 210 new, multipurpose club needed, 118–19, 122 and patriotism narrative, 67 situation in 1945, 112–13, 122 investment promotion agencies, 150–51 Irish Investment Authority, 151 Islamist terrorism, 42, 212, 213 Italy, 4, 58, 160 James, William, 29* Janesville (US study), 178 Japan, 72–3, 94, 101, 149, 192 John Lewis Partnership, 83, 172 Johnson, Robert Wood, 39–40, 72 Johnson & Johnson, 39–40, 41, 72, 74*, 79 Jolie, Angelina, 112 JP Morgan, 71* Juppé, Alain, 204 Kagame, Paul, 22 Kay, John, 82*, 84, 211 Keynes, John Maynard, 115 General Theory (1936), 47 kindergartens, 163 Knausgård, Karl Ove, 173 knowledge revolution, 126, 127–8 Kranton, Rachel, 35, 50–51 Krueger, Anne, 141 Krugman, Paul, 47 labour market flexicurity concept, 178 function of, 176–7 and globalization, 192, 194–6 and immigration, 194, 195, 196 investment in skills, 176–7 job security, 176, 177 and low productivity-low cost business model, 173–4 minimum wage strategies, 147, 174, 176, 180 need for reductions in working hours, 189 need for renewed purpose in work, 190 regulation of, 174, 189 and robotics revolution, 178–9 role of state, 177–8, 189 see also unemployment Labour Party, 49, 206 Marxist take-over of, 9, 204–5 language, 31, 32, 33, 39–40, 54, 57 Larkin, Philip, 99, 156 lawyers, 13–14, 45 Buiter’s three types, 186 and shell companies, 193, 194 surfeit of, 186–7 taxation of private litigation proposal, 187–8 Le Pen, Marine, 5, 63, 125, 202, 204 leadership and belief systems, 41–2, 43, 95 building of shared identity, 39–42, 49, 68, 114–16 changing role of, 39 and flattening of hierarchies, 39 and ISIS, 42 political achievements in post-war period, 113–16, 122 and pragmatist philosophy, 22 and shared purpose in firms, 39–40, 41, 71–5 strategic use of morality, 39–40, 41 transformation of power into authority, 39, 41–2, 57 League of Nations, 116 Lee Kwan Yew, 22, 147 Lehman Brothers, 71*, 76 liberalism, 30 libertarianism, 12–13, 15 New Right failures, 16, 21 Silicon Valley, 37–8 lobbying, 85, 141 local government, 182, 183 London, 3, 125, 127–8, 165–6, 193 impact of Brexit on, 131, 196 migration to, 195–6 Macron, Emmanuel, 67, 204 Manchester terror attack (2017), 212, 213 market economy, 19, 20, 21, 25, 48 and collapse of clusters, 129–30, 144–5 failure over pensions, 180 failure over skill-formation, 173–4 mutual benefit from exchange, 28 market fundamentalists, 147, 150 marriage assortative mating, 35, 99–100, 154, 188–9 cohabitation prior to, 99, 100 as ‘commitment technology’, 109, 155–6 divorce rates, 98, 99, 100–101, 102, 103 and female oppression, 156 religious associations, 109, 156 and rent-seeking, 141 ‘shotgun weddings’, 103 and unemployment, 103 Marxism, 13*, 26, 30, 43, 47, 113, 203, 214 alienation concept, 17–18 and the family, 36–7 late capitalism concept, 6 takeover of Labour Party, 9, 204–5 and ‘useful idiots’, 205* view of the state, 37 Maxwell, Robert, 80 May, Theresa, 205 Mayer, Colin, 18, 70 media celebrities, 6, 112, 204 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 5, 202, 204 mental health, 157, 158–9, 162 Mercier, Hugo, 29 meritocratic elites, 3–4, 5, 12–17, 20 Rawlsian vanguard, 13–14, 30, 49–50, 53, 67, 112, 113, 201, 202, 203, 214 Utilitarian vanguard, 9–10, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 52, 53, 59, 66–7, 209 see also Utilitarianism WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Developed), 3–4, 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 116, 121, 133, 214* and white working class, 5, 16 Merkel, Angela, 14, 205 metropolitan areas, 3, 4, 7, 16, 19, 48, 125 co-ordination problem over new clusters, 145–50, 207 economies of agglomeration, 18, 19, 129, 131, 133–44, 195, 196, 207 gains from public goods, 134–5, 138–9 migration to, 195–6 political responses to dominance of, 131–2 scale and specialization in, 126–8, 130, 144–5 and taxation, 131, 132–43, 187, 207 Middle East, 192 Middleton, Kate, 188–9 migration, 121, 194–8, 203 as driven by absolute advantage, 20, 194–5, 208–9 and housing market, 182, 183 Mill, John Stuart, 9–10 minimum wage strategies, 147, 174, 176, 180 Mitchell, Andrew, 188 Mitchell, Edson, 78 modernist architecture, 12 Monarch Airlines, 75 monopolies, natural, 86–7, 88 and asymmetric information, 88, 90 auctioning of rights, 88–9 taxation of, 91–2 utility services, 86, 89, 90 ‘moral hazard’, 179 morality and ethics deriving from values not reason, 27, 28–9, 42–3 and economic man, 10, 19, 25, 26–7, 31, 34–5 and empathy, 12, 27 evolution of ethical norms, 35–6 Haidt’s fundamental values, 11–12, 14, 16, 29, 42–3, 132–3 and market economy, 21, 25, 28, 48 and modern capitalism, 25–6 and new elites, 3–4, 20–21 Adam Smith’s theories, 26–8 use for strategic purposes, 39–40, 41 and Utilitarianism, 9–10, 11, 14, 16, 55, 66–7, 209, 214 motivated reasoning, 28–9, 36, 86, 144, 150, 167 Museveni, President, 121 narratives and childhood mentors, 169–70 and consistency, 41, 67, 81, 96 conveyed by language, 31, 33, 57 detachment from place by e-networks, 38, 61–2 and heyday of social democracy, 49 and identity formation, 32 mis-ranking of cognitive and non-cognitive training, 174–6 moral norms generated from, 33, 97–8 and purposive action, 33–4, 40–41, 42, 68 and schools, 165 of shared identity, 53–6, 81 use of by leaders, 39–42, 43, 49, 80–81 see also belonging, narrative of; obligation, narrative of; purposive action National Health Service (NHS), 49, 159 national identity and citizens-of-the-world agenda, 59–61, 63, 65 contempt of the educated for, 53, 59, 60–61, 63 and distinctive common culture, 37†, 63 established in childhood, 32 esteem from, 51–3 fracture to skill-based identities, 3–5, 51–6, 78 legacy of Second World War, 15, 16 methods of rebuilding, 64, 65–8, 211–15 and new nationalists, 62–3, 67, 203, 204, 205 patriotism narrative, 21, 63, 67, 215 place-based identity, 51–6, 65–8, 211–14, 215 and polarization of society, 54–5 and secession movements, 58 unravelling of shared identity, 15, 50, 51–6, 57*, 58–61, 63, 215 and value identity, 64–5 National Review, 16 nationalism, 34 based on ethnicity or religion, 62–3 capture of national identity notion by, 62, 67, 215 and narratives of hatred, 56, 57, 58–9 and oppositional identities, 56–7, 58–9, 62–3, 68, 215 traditional form of, 62 natural rights concept, 12, 13 Nestlé, 70, 71 Netherlands, 206 networked groups as arena for exchanging obligations, 28 and ‘common knowledge’, 32–3, 34, 54, 55, 66, 212 decline of civil society networks/ groups, 180–81 and early man, 31 evolution of ethical norms, 35–6 exclusion of disruptive narratives, 34 families as, 97–8 leadership’s use of narratives, 39–42, 49 narratives detached from place, 38, 61–2 value-based echo-chambers, 38, 61–2, 64–5, 212, 215 see also family; firms Neustadt, Richard, 39* New York City, 5, 125, 128, 143–4, 193 NGOs, 71, 118, 157–8 ‘niche construction’, 35*, 36* Nigeria, 58 Noble, Diana, 149* Norman, Jesse, 21–2† North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 114, 115, 116, 117 North Korea, 85 Northern League, Italy, 58 Norway, 63, 206, 208–9 Nozick, Robert, 14–15 obligation, narrative of, 11, 12–13, 16, 19, 29, 33 and collapse of social democracy, 53–6, 210 entitled individual vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 in ethical world, 112, 113–22 and expansion of post-war ‘clubs’, 117–18, 210 fairness and loyalty instilled by, 34 heyday of the ethical state, 48–9, 68, 196–7 and immigration, 196–7 and leadership, 39, 40–41, 49 ‘oughts’ and ‘wants’, 27, 28, 33, 43 and secession movements, 58 and Adam Smith, 27, 28 see also reciprocity; rescue, duty of oil industry, 192 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 114–15, 125 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), 5 Oxford university, 7, 70, 100 Paris, 5, 7, 125, 128, 174, 179 patriotism, 21, 63, 67, 215 Pause (NGO), 157–8 pension funds, 76–7, 79–81, 179–80, 185 Pew Research Center, 169 Pinker, Steven, 12* Plato, The Republic, 9, 11, 12, 15, 43 Playboy magazine, 99 political power and holders of economic rent, 135–6, 144 leadership selection systems in UK, 204–5, 206 minimum age for voting, 203 need to restore the centre, 205–7 polarization within polities, 38, 63, 202–5 polities as spatial, 38, 61–2, 65, 68, 211–13 and shared identity, 8, 57–61, 65, 114–16, 211–15 transformation into authority, 41–2, 57–8 trust in government, 4, 5, 48, 59, 210, 211–12 populism, political, 6, 22, 43, 58–9, 202 and geographic divide, 130–31 headless-heart, 30, 60, 112, 119, 121, 122 media celebrities, 6, 112, 204 pragmatism as opposed to, 30 and US presidential election (2016), 5, 203–4 pragmatist philosophy, 6, 9, 19, 21, 21–2†, 46, 201 author’s proposed policies, 19–20, 21, 207–15 limitations of, 30 and Macron in France, 204 and migration, 198 and post-war settlement, 113, 116, 122 and social democracy, 18, 201–2 successful leaders, 22 and taxation, 132, 207 and teaching methods, 166–7 values and reason, 29–30, 43–4 proportional representation, 206 protectionism, 113, 114, 130–31 psychology, social, 16, 54 co-ordination problems, 32–3 esteem’s trumping of money, 174 Haidt’s fundamental values, 11–12, 14, 16, 29, 42–3, 132–3 narratives, 31, 32, 33–4, 38, 39–42, 49, 53–6 norms, 33, 35–6, 39, 42–3, 44, 97–8, 107–8 ‘oughts’ and ‘wants’, 27, 28, 33, 43 personal achievement vs family obligation, 99–103, 104–6, 108–9, 210 ‘theory of mind’, 27, 55 Public Choice Theory, 15–16 public goods, 134–5, 138–9, 186, 202, 213 public ownership, 90 Puigdemont, Carles, 202 purposive action, 18, 21, 25, 26, 34, 40*, 53–4, 68, 112, 211–13 autonomy and responsibility, 38–9 and belonging narrative, 68, 98, 114, 211, 212, 213 in Bhutan, 37† decline in ethical purpose across society, 48 and heyday of social democracy, 47, 49, 114 and narratives, 33–4, 40–41, 42, 68 in workplace, 190 Putnam, Robert, 45–6, 106 Bowling Alone, 181 ‘quality circles’, 72–3 Rajan, Raghuram, 178 Rand, Ayn, 32 rational social woman, 31, 50–51, 196 Rawls, John, 13–14 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 26 Reback, Gary, 90 reciprocity, 9, 19, 31, 212–15 and belonging, 25, 40–41, 49, 53–6, 67, 68, 98, 181, 182, 210–11, 212–13 and collapse of social democracy, 11, 14, 53–6, 58–61, 201, 210 and corporate behaviour, 95 in ethical world, 112, 113–15, 116 and expansion of post-war ‘clubs’, 117–18, 210 fairness and loyalty as supporting, 29, 31, 34 and the family, 97–8, 101, 102 and geographic divide, 125 heyday of the ethical state, 48–9, 68, 96, 196–7, 201 and ISIS, 42 Macron’s patriotism narrative, 67 nineteenth-century co-operatives, 8 rights matched to obligations, 44–5 and three types of narrative, 33, 34, 40–41 transformation of power into authority, 39, 41–2, 57–8 Refuge (Betts and Collier), 27 refugees, 14, 27, 115, 119–20, 213 regulation, 87–90 and globalization, 193–4 of labour market, 174 religion, 56–7, 62–3, 109, 156 religious fundamentalism, 6, 30, 36–7, 212, 213, 215 rent-seeking concept, 140–41, 150, 186, 187–8, 195 rescue, duty of, 40, 54, 119–21, 210, 213 as instrument for ethical imperialism, 117–18, 210 as not matched by rights, 44, 45, 117 and post-war settlement, 113, 115–16 restoring and augmenting autonomy, 121–2 and stressed young families, 163 term defined, 27, 112 value of care as underpinning, 29 retirement pensions, 179–80 rights ideology and corresponding obligations, 44–5 emergence in 1970s, 12–14 human rights lobby, 112, 118, 118* individualism as rampant in recent decades, 19, 214–15 and lawyers, 13–14, 45 Libertarian use of, 12–13, 14–15 natural rights concept, 12, 13 and New Right, 12–13, 14–15, 53 Rawls’ disadvantaged groups, 3–4, 13–14, 16, 50, 53, 112, 121, 203–4, 214 ‘rights of the child’ concept, 103–4 and Utilitarian atate, 12–14 see also individualism Romania, communist, 32, 36 Rotherham, ‘Grimm and Co’, 168–9 rule of law, 138–9, 186 Rwanda, 22 Salmond, Alex, 202 Sandel, Michael, 105 Sanders, Bernie, 9, 64, 202, 203 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 204 Schultz, Martin, 14 Schumpeter, Joseph, 21* Scotland, 58 Seligman, Martin, 108–9 sexual behaviour birth-control pill, 98–9, 102 and class divide, 99, 102, 155–6 concept of sin, 156 and HIV, 121 and stigma, 156–8 sexual orientation, 3, 45 Sheffield, 7, 8, 126, 128–9, 131, 151, 168, 192 shell companies, 193, 194 Shiller, Robert, 34 Sidgwick, Henry, 55 Signalling, Theory of, 41, 43, 53, 63, 95 Silicon Valley, 37–8, 62, 145, 152, 164 Singapore, 22, 147 Slovenia, 58 Smith, Adam, 14, 21, 21–2†, 174 and mutual benefit from exchange, 28 and pursuit of self- interest, 26–7, 40 on reason, 29 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), 27, 28, 174 Wealth of Nations (1776), 26, 28, 174 Smith, Vernon, 28 social democracy ‘Butskellism’, 49* collapse of, 9, 11, 50, 51–6, 116–18, 201–2, 210 communitarian roots, 8–9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 48–9, 201 and group identities, 3–4, 13–14, 51–6 heyday of, 8–9, 15, 17, 47, 48–9, 68, 96, 196–7, 201, 210 and housing, 181–2 influence of Utilitarianism, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 49–50, 201, 203, 214 Libertarian challenge, 12–13, 14–15 New Right abandonment of, 14–15, 16, 26, 53 and Public Choice Theory, 15–16 replaced by social paternalism, 11–13, 49–50, 209–10 and rights ideology, 12–14 and secession movements, 58 shared identity harnessed by, 15, 196–7 unravelling of shared identity, 15, 50, 51–6, 57*, 58–61, 63, 215 and Utilitarianism, 214 social maternalism concept, 21, 154–5, 190 free pre-school education, 163–4 mentoring for children, 169–70, 208 support for stressed families, 20, 155, 157–60, 161–3, 208 social media, 27, 61, 87, 173, 207, 215 social paternalism backlash against, 11–13, 15–16 as cavalier about globalization, 20 and child-rearing/family, 105, 110, 154–5, 157, 158, 159, 160, 190, 209 replaces social democracy, 11–13, 49–50, 209–10 ‘rights of the child’ concept, 103–4 and Utilitarian vanguard, 9–10, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 66–7, 209 social services, 159 scrutiny role, 162 Solow, Robert, 141 Soros, George, 15* South Africa, 85 South Asia, 192 South Korea, 129, 130–31 South Sudan, 192 Soviet Union, 114, 115, 116, 203 Spain, 58, 160 specialization, 17–18, 36, 126–8, 130, 144–5, 192 Spence, Michael, 41, 53, 95 Sperber, Dan, 29 St Andrews University, 189 Stanford University, 145, 152 Starbucks, 193 the state, 19 ethical capacities of, 11, 20–21, 48–9 failures in 1930s, 47, 48 ideologies hostile to, 37–8 and pre-school education, 163–4 and prosperity, 37 public policy and job shocks, 177–8 public policy on the family, 21, 154–5, 157–70, 171–3, 177, 209 public-sector and co-ordination problem, 147–8 social maternalism policies, 21, 157, 190 Utilitarian takeover of public policy, 10–12, 13–14, 15–17, 18, 49–50, 113, 201 Stiglitz, Joseph, 56 Stoke-on-Trent, 129 Stonehenge, 64 Sudan, 8 Summers, Larry, 187 Sure Start programme, 164 Sutton, John, 151* Sweden, 178 Switzerland, 175, 206 Tanzania, 193 taxation and corporate globalization, 193, 194 of economic rents, 91–2, 187–8 ethics and efficiency, 132–43 on financial transactions, 187 generational differences in attitudes, 59 Henry George’s Theorem, 133–6, 141 heyday of the ethical state, 49 issues of desert, 132–3, 134–9 and the metropolis, 131, 132–43, 187, 207 and migration, 197 of natural monopolies, 91–2 ‘optimal’, 10 of private litigation in courts, 187–8 and reciprocity, 54, 55, 59 redesign of needed, 19 redistributive, 10, 11, 14, 49, 54, 55, 60, 197 of rents of agglomeration, 19, 132–44, 207 social maternalism policies, 21, 157 substantial decline in top rates, 55 tax havens, 62 Venables-Collier theory, 136–9 Teach First programme, 165–6 technical vocational education and training (TVET), 171–6 technological change, 4 robotics revolution, 178–9 and withering of spatial community, 61–2 see also digital networks telomeres, 155–6 Tepperman, Jonathan, The Fix, 22 Thatcher, Margaret, 15, 26 Thirty Years War, 56–7 Tirole, Jean, 177, 178 Toyota, 72–3, 74, 94, 172 trade unions, 173, 174, 176 Troubled Families Programme (TFP), 162 Trudeau, Pierre, 22 Trump, Donald, 5, 9, 63, 64, 86, 125, 136, 202, 204, 206, 215 Uber, 87 unemployment in 1930s, 47 and collapse of industry, 7, 103, 129, 192 impact on children, 160–61 older workers, 4, 103, 213 retraining schemes, 178 in USA, 160 young people, 4 Unilever, 70, 71 United Kingdom collapse of heavy industry, 7, 103, 129, 192 extreme politics in, 5 and falling life expectancy, 4 financial sector, 80, 83, 84–5 IMF bail-out (1976), 115 local banks in past, 146 northern England, 3, 7, 8, 84, 126, 128–9, 131, 151, 168, 192 shareholder control of firms, 76–7, 79, 80, 82–3 statistics on firms in, 37 universities in, 170, 172, 175* vocational education in, 172, 175† widening of geographic divide, 125 United Nations, 65, 112 ‘Club of 77’, 116 Security Council, 116 UNHCR, 115 United States breakdown of ethical family, 104–5 broken cities in, 129, 130 extreme politics in, 5, 63 and falling life expectancy, 4 financial sector, 83–4, 186 and global e-utilities, 89–90 growth in inequality since 1980, 125 heyday of the ethical state, 49 and knowledge industries, 192 labour market in, 176, 178 local banks in past, 146 oversight of firms in, 76 pessimism in, 5, 45–6 presidential election (2016), 5, 9, 203–4 Public Interest Companies, 93 public policy as predominantly national, 212 ‘rights of the child’ concept in, 103–4 Roosevelt’s New Deal, 47 statistics on firms in, 37 taxation in, 143–4, 144* unemployment in, 160 universities in, 170, 172, 173 weakening of NATO commitment, 117 universities in broken cities, 151–2 in EU countries, 170 expansion of, 99–100, 127 knowledge clusters at, 127, 151–2 low quality vocational courses, 172–3 in UK, 170, 172, 175* in US, 170, 172, 173 urban planning, post-war, 11–12 Utilitarianism, 19, 30, 49–50, 55, 108, 112, 121, 210–11 backlash against, 11–13, 201, 202 belonging as absent from discourse, 16, 59, 66–7, 210–11 care as key value, 12 and consumption, 10, 11, 16, 19–20, 209 equality as key value, 12, 13, 14, 15, 116, 132–3, 214 incorporated into economics, 10–11, 13–14, 16 influence on social democrats, 9, 10, 14, 16, 18, 49–50, 201, 203, 214 origins of, 9–10 paternalistic guardians, 9–10, 11–13, 66–7, 210 takeover of public policy, 10–12, 13–14, 15–17, 18, 49–50, 113, 201 and taxation, 10, 132*, 133 vanguard’s switch of identity salience, 52, 53, 59 Valls, Manuel, 204 Venables, Tony, 18, 136, 191* Venezuela, 120, 214 vested interests, 85–6, 135–6, 165, 166, 207 Volkswagen, 74–5 Walmart, 87 Warsi, Baroness Sayeeda, 65 Wedgwood, Josiah, 129 welfare state, 9, 48–9 unlinked from contributions, 14 well-being and happiness belonging and esteem, 16, 25, 27, 29, 31–3, 34, 42, 51–6, 97–8, 174 entitled individual vs family obligation, 108–9 and financial success, 26, 94 ‘ladder of life’, 25* poverty in Africa, 37 reciprocity as decisive for, 31 Westminster, Duke of, 136 white working class ‘elite’ attitudes to, 4, 5, 16 falling life expectancy, 4, 16 pessimism of, 5 William, Prince, 188–9 Williams, Bernard, 55* Wittgenstein, 62, 63 Wolf, Alison, 52–3, 155 World Bank, 115, 117, 118, 118*, 122 World Food Programme, 115 World Health Organization, 115 World Trade Organization (WTO), 116–17 Yugoslavia, 58 Zingales, Luigi, 178 Zuma, Jacob, 85 Copyright THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

CFO – Chief Financial Officer The finance function, although historically very conservative and cautious, is about to face radical disruption from several technologies, including AI (Deep Learning), sensors and Bitcoin (the underlying block chain protocol in particular). Key Opportunity Implications and Actions AI accounting Automatic A/P, A/R software-enabling automatic reminders and payment, automatic tax management, and AIs watching for errant behaviors in transaction flows. Taxation without borders Governments are getting their act together regarding tax havens, which will likely continue to face ever-closer scrutiny in the coming years. Digital payment solutions More than 60,000 merchants already accept Bitcoin, which we predict will hit Wall Street in late 2014 and will most likely be mainstream by 2016. This is in addition to the growing impact of Square and PayPal.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

I want our greater prosperity not to be confined to particular groups of people or a single part of the country.’ Listening to May, who delights in reminding Labour that the Tories have had two women prime ministers, speak about the need to create a society ‘that works for everyone, not just the few’, is to understand that her threat to turn Britain into an offshore tax haven if the EU seeks to ‘punish’ her government for opting for a hard Brexit is no more than a transparent negotiating gambit. Although many on the right yearn for such an outcome, she does not. the common good So far, the rhetorical positioning has been matched by policy initiatives that are modest and incremental at best.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

We could do something about illicit financial flows too. Right now, some $1 trillion is stolen out of global South countries each year and stashed in offshore secrecy jurisdictions, mostly by multinational companies seeking to evade taxes.42 For example, companies might generate profits in Guatemala or South Africa, but then shift that money into tax havens like Luxembourg or the British Virgin Islands. This starves global South countries of the revenues they need to invest in public services. But it is not an intractable problem: we could shut down the tax evasion system with laws to regulate cross-border trade and corporate accounting. Another step would be to democratise the key international institutions that set the rules of the global economy.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘People and Martians’, London Review of Books 41:2 (24 January 2019). 102. Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Harvard University Press, 2018). 103. Larry Diamond, ‘Liberation Technology’, Journal of Democracy (20 July 2010). 104. Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (University of Chicago Press, 2016). 105. Franklin Foer, ‘How Kleptocracy Came to America’, The Atlantic (March 2019). 106. Yablokov, Fortress Russia. 107. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/agenda/briefing/2018-01-15/4/russia-s-propaganda-in-the-eu. 3. IMITATION AS DISPOSSESSION 1. Made into a critically acclaimed film by Sidney Lumet in 1971; Kenneth Branagh’s remake appeared in 2017. 2.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

There are those skulking around on the various floors of the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Commission, who might hope that one day these arrangements will eventually come about. Indeed, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, announced in August 2016 that ‘borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians’ – an odd remark coming from someone who, in a previous life, had diligently turned Luxembourg into a tax haven. FROM GRAVE NEW WORLD TO NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR In the real world, however, the political ‘mood music’ is rather different. The key drivers of globalization in the modern era – flows of capital, people and technology – have left many people feeling distinctly uncomfortable. They have no time for further integration, and they no longer trust those who argue that globalization is in everyone’s best interests.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In most developed countries, the highest income earners are the only group to have enjoyed a rising share in incomes since the 1990s. In the US, the concentration of income and wealth is at its highest level since the early twentieth century—the Gilded Age. The ability of the affluent to avoid taxation, utilizing offshore tax havens or other stratagems, may understate the true level of inequality. The “Queen of Mean,” wealthy hotel magnate Leona Helmsley, argued: “Only the little people pay taxes.”3 Statistics are an imperfect guide to inequality. The new rich are the working rich—entrepreneurs, business executives, bankers, lawyers, and technologists—rather than scions of landed gentry or rentiers living off accumulated wealth.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Or perhaps to an even cheaper, low-tax newly industrialising country in Asia such as Thailand or Indonesia. Or to Ireland or the UK, where the government would be more likely to subsidise an inward investor than tax them. Or they could simply rearrange their internal transactions in order to minimise their tax bill. German politicians have complained about competition from ‘tax havens’ within the EU — naming the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium.19 But simply to list the countries they have complained about is to realise how unlikely politicians are to be able to reverse the trend. Indeed, as one German minister complained, another gave a speech about the need to reduce the tax burden on German businesses.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Perhaps the biggest policy letdown of our day is the failure of governments in advanced democracies to address rising inequality. This too has its roots in domestic politics—the hold on the policy process by financial and business elites and the narratives they have spun about the limits of redistributive policies. Sure, global tax havens are an example of beggar-thy-neighbor policies. But powerful countries such as the United States and European nations could have done much on their own to limit tax evasion—and the race to the bottom in corporate taxation—if they so desired. So, the problems of our day have little to do with the lack of global cooperation.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

During the four days of the “Good Knowledge Summit,” as the event was called, bureaucrats in business casual worked alongside hackers in T-shirts to develop and distill the discussions into policy. The opening night included bold pronouncements. “This is not just an abstract dream,” said Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of knowledge and human talent. “Many of the things we talk about these days will become a reality.” Rather than tax havens, added the subsecretary of science, technology, and innovation, Rina Pazos, “we need to establish havens of open and common knowledge.” Bauwens spent most of his time in the sessions on policies for cooperatives. In Ecuador, as in many places, it is harder to start a co-op than a private company.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

The average underreporting of adjusted gross income is 3.8 per cent for the bottom 50 per cent of taxpayers, and 17 per cent for the top 1 per cent of taxpayers. By contrast to underreporting of income, underreporting of tax is higher among lower-income taxpayers. Note too that audit studies can miss income in tax havens, which is strongly skewed towards the top: Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen & Gabriel Zucman, ‘Tax Evasion and Inequality’, NBER Working Paper No. 23772, Cambridge, MA: NBER, 2017. 35Eric Avis, Claudio Ferraz & Frederico Finan, ‘Do government audits reduce corruption? Estimating the impacts of exposing corrupt politicians’, Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming. 36F.H.


High-Frequency Trading by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado, Maureen O'Hara

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, computer vision, continuous double auction, dark matter, discrete time, finite state, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Large Hadron Collider, latency arbitrage, margin call, market design, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, National best bid and offer, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Tobin tax, transaction costs, two-sided market, yield curve

Most importantly, financial transactions taxes do not tax value added in the financial sector. There have been a number of academic studies, both theoretical and empirical, on the effect of financial transaction taxes, and transaction costs more generally. Overall, the results suggest that financial transactions taxes will give rise to significant relocation effects to tax havens, cannot be expected to reduce price volatility in asset markets and will bring about a sizable drop in market capitalisation that will be borne by the holders of the securities, including pension funds, whether or not they trade repeatedly or bear the FTT. For instance, a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that with plausible numbers such as an annual turnover of equity portfolios of 44%, an FTT of 0.1% and a dividend yield of 1.1%, the drop in market value is around 4.2%.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

Cyprus wasn’t poor—but it was … different. It was well known that the banks in Cyprus were out of control; that between them, they held eight times the size of the entire GDP of the small island country. She also knew that a large portion of that was Russian money. Cyprus had turned itself into a tax haven, charging zero taxes, inviting money from everywhere, and had become the stomping ground of Russian oligarchs, and mobsters who were looking for a safe place to put their ill-gotten wealth. Supposedly, more than thirty billion dollars’ worth of Russian money had found its way into Cyprus’s banks.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Much of this process is automated through filtering software, but such systems tend to generate large amounts of hits: most turn out to be false positives, but each one must be checked by an analyst. Most effort, though, is expended in filing suspicious-transaction reports and looking for moneylaundering patterns. Some may be easy to spot, such as the small butcher who deposits $350,000 per week or receives frequent back-to-back transfers from tax havens; the much used laundering technique of over- or underinvoicing otherwise legitimate trade flows, however, is much more difficult to detect. The task is made harder by the fact that money launderers change and adapt their methods in a constant game of cat and mouse. So, what did US Customs agent Robert Mazur eventually find when he decided to follow the money instead of the drugs?


Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

And all the while they hear about dot-com riches and stock market winnings being showered on people who haven’t really done much of anything … So, quietly and to themselves, people start to wonder, as the country becomes fabulously wealthy: Why play by the rules? We live in a climate where big companies have a criminal outlook and often employ criminal methods. Where the City of London treats criminal money as indistinguishable from legitimate funds, acts as a tax haven and launders money. Meanwhile, people are told that more and more of their actions are illegal, as more of human experience is assessed and judged. Some people grow up to be a bank robber because their daddy was a bank robber. What do we raise the next generation to be in a country run by thieves?


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

And if taxes go up from here, the slice of the pie you get to eat gets smaller. And it’s a spiraling effect because the less you get to keep and spend, the more you have to withdraw. The more you withdraw, the quicker you run out. SENATOR WILLIAM ROTH: THE BEST LEGAL TAX HAVEN? A Roth IRA—and more recently the addition of the Roth 401(k)—is often overlooked, but it is one of the best and yet legal “tax havens” in the face of rising future tax rates. And we owe a big tip of the cap to Senator William Roth for their introduction back in 1997. Let’s look at how they work. If you were a farmer, would you rather pay tax on the seed of your crop or on the entire harvest once you have grown it?


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

It would remain a WTO member but not have access to the markets of other WTO members without first agreeing to their terms and demands for trading with Britain. It might be assumed that such support would be automatic, but any state that has some deep-lying difference with Britain – Argentina on the Falklands or Spain on Gibraltar or many countries that object to tax havens situated in British-controlled crown colonies and territories – could demand bilateral negotiations and concessions from London in exchange for support for WTO membership. Drawing up all the legal schedules, even within a WTO framework, can take years. The EU, for example, has quotas on every product it imports – chickens from Brazil or wheat from Australia.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Lawrence Summers, “The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine: A Hamilton Project Policy Forum,” National Press Club, February 19, 2015, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/events/the_future_of_work_in_the_age_of_the_machine. 17. Robert McIntyre, Richard Phillips, and Phineas Baxandall, “Offshore Shell Games 2015: The Use of Offshore Tax Havens by Fortune 500 Companies,” Citizens for Tax Justice, 2015, http://ctj.org/pdf/offshoreshell2015.pdf. 18. Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market—and How to Successfully Transform Them (New York: Crown, 2001), 13. First chapter available at: http://itech.fgcu.edu/fac ulty/bhobbs/Creative%20destruction%20McKinsey%20Report%20CDch1.pdf. 19.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

The removal of capital controls appears to be the main factor driving the reduction in corporate tax rates since the 1980s.9 The problem has become a big enough headache for tax agencies that efforts are under way within the OECD and European Union to identify and roll back instances of so-called “harmful tax competition.” To date, these activities have only focused on tax havens in a number of microstates ranging from Andorra to Vanuatu. The real challenge is to safeguard the integrity of each nation’s corporate tax regime in a world where enterprises and their capital are footloose. This challenge remains unaddressed. Health and safety standards. Most people would subscribe to the principle that nations ought to be free to determine their own standards with respect to public health and safety.


pages: 347 words: 99,969

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher

Alfred Russel Wallace, correlation does not imply causation, Kickstarter, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

For as loftily as it had once soared, so precipitously did the theory then crash, when it transpired that Sapir and especially his student Whorf had attributed far-fetched cognitive consequences to what were in fact mere differences in grammatical organization. Today, any mention of linguistic relativity will make most linguists shift uneasily in their chairs, and “Whorfianism” has largely become an intellectual tax haven for mystical philosophers, fantasists, and postmodern charlatans. Why then should one bother telling the story of a disgraced idea? The reason is not (just) to be smug with hindsight and show how even very clever people can sometimes be silly. Although there is undeniable pleasure in such an exercise, the real reason for exposing the sins of the past is this: although Whorf’s wild claims were largely bogus, I will try to convince you later that the notion that language can influence thoughts should not be dismissed out of hand.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Most of the key international civil servants present were also Europeans: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund; Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organization; Mario Draghi of the Financial Stability Forum. At his closing press conference, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was bubbling with excitement at the possibilities the G20 had opened up. “Banking secrecy, that’s all over,” he cackled, lauding a G20 agreement on tax havens. This was a “historic occasion”; the atmosphere between the G20 leaders was “superb.” There would be many more achievements to come at future G20 summits. President Sarkozy sometimes fits the stereotype of the excitable Frenchman, but he is not alone in seeing huge possibilities in the G20. It is true that the organization has started modestly, but then the modern-day European Union also started quite deliberately with baby steps.


pages: 322 words: 99,066

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

They called for laws to enshrine source protection, free speech and freedom of information. Jónsdóttir, 43, is an anti-capitalist activist, poet and artist – an unexpectedly romantic figure to find in the Reykjavik legislature. “They were presenting this idea they called the ‘Switzerland of bytes’,” she explains, “which was basically to take the tax haven model and transform it into the transparency haven model.” Assange decided to publish some Icelandic tidbits from his newly acquired secret cache of military material to coincide with the MMI campaign: one was a very recent cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik, dated 13 January 2010, describing Icelandic officials’ views about the banking crisis.


pages: 385 words: 99,985

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

carbon-based life, content marketing, Frank Gehry, gentrification, intentional community, lateral thinking, machine translation, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pattern recognition, rent stabilization

"Still in Ohio. Getting somewhere, though." "Where's that?" She sits on the edge of the bed. Checks her watch. "A domain name. Armaz-dot-ru." She can't think of anything to say. "Nazran," he says. "What's that?" "Capital of the Republic of Ingushetia. It's an ofshornaya zona." "A what?" "An offshore tax haven. For Russia. They liked Cyprus so much, for that, they decided to grow their own. Set it up in Ingush. The guy the domain is registered to is in Cyprus, but he works for some ofshornaya outfit in Ingush. That's probably where Dorotea's Russian flavor is coming from." "How do you know he's from… Ingush?"


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

When the natural turnover rate of an item is low, the tax rate is also low, so that the “price” (in the form of tax payment) to protect it from potential sales is also low. Family heirlooms are almost always valued more by their possessors than by strangers, so in practice it would not cost much to protect them. Or it may well make sense to exclude family heirlooms and other personal items, within reason (to avoid creating a tax haven), from the COST system altogether. The aggregate value of these things is just not very large, so the economic impact of incorporating them into the COST system would also not be large. In the United States, all states have laws known as exemption statutes that identify personal items that cannot be taken by creditors when a person files for bankruptcy (clothes, Bibles, a limited amount of furniture, even guns).


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Instead, they must focus on creating the kind of economic environment that spurs genuine growth and consumption. In a single stroke, this shift will give rise to a system in which economic efficiency drives the choice of location where goods and services are produced, rather than artificial incentives giving rise to tax havens like Baddi and its ilk. Breaking the logjam with the Goods and Services Tax How do you find out whether a government is serious about implementing a particular reform initiative? In our experience, the answer is to pay close attention to the speeches that its leaders make, whether it’s the Budget speech in Parliament or the Independence Day speech delivered by the prime minister from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort.


pages: 305 words: 98,072

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely by Andrew Craig

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Schwager, Jack D. Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders. Columbia: Marketplace, 2006. Sculley, John. Moonshot!: Game-changing Strategies to Build Billion-dollar Businesses. Rosettabooks, 2014. Shaxson, Nicholas. Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World. London: Bodley Head, 2011. Shiller, Robert J. Finance and the Good Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Shipman, Mark. Big Money, Little Effort a Winning Strategy for Profitable Long-Term Investment. London: Kogan Page Publishers, 2008. ———. The Next Big Investment Boom: Learn the Secrets of Investing from a Master and How to Profit from Commodities.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Many musicians have also been aggressive in trying to avoid tax payments. The pop singer Shakira, for example, came under investigation for possible tax evasion in Spain.31 And some musicians have gotten into trouble because their business manager or tax adviser set up a scheme to evade taxes—for example, by booking income through a third party in a tax haven—that caused the musicians to lose control of their income. Keith Urban and Madonna appeared in the leaked “Paradise Papers” documents that detailed offshore tax arrangements. But it is excessive spending—leaving too little to live on after their career is over and neglecting to provide for children’s college tuition and other needs—that is a problem for many musicians, and millions of Americans.


pages: 356 words: 97,794

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, low skilled workers, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

The isolated colony of Kedumim, one of the veteran post-1967 settlements, still exists today as an Orthodox enclave where women wearing trousers are not welcome and men dress like early American settlers in the Wild West, down to their beards and guns in their holsters, like Al-Qaeda fighters. In such colonies the synagogue is the centre of the community and the rabbis’ sermons are a mixture of anti-Arab racism and Jewish messianism. The colonies also developed as the equivalent of offshore tax havens. Cheap Palestinian labour was employed, taxes were cut, as the Likud government regarded these colonies as deserving preferential treatment since they were located in ‘security risk’ areas, which granted them special tax concessions and allowed for subsidy in every aspect of life.2 A kind of dualism developed.


pages: 354 words: 99,690

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life by David Mitchell

bank run, Boris Johnson, British Empire, cakes and ale, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Julian Assange, lateral thinking, Northern Rock, Ocado, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, profit motive, Russell Brand, sensible shoes, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

But it’s not a lot of money for the government either, so it wouldn’t really matter if the taxpayer had paid – apart from the principle of the thing. By which I mean all the adverse publicity. People care much more about that £370,000 than about vastly greater sums being squandered or saved less interestingly. Just like people, some bits of money are cared about more than others. Some bits are cherished in coin collections or tax havens; others are left to fend for themselves down the back of sofas or in the budgets of lazily written action movies. In my life, the money I would otherwise spend on shampoo is very dear to me. I buy the cheapest possible shampoo. When I can steal it from hotels, I do. I use every last squirt from every bottle, eking out days’ more use from each one when most people would have thrown it away.


pages: 316 words: 103,743

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

They are a mix of Burmese and Chinese contemporary styles: all white and blue tiles with balconies supported by grandiose columns. High walls topped with coiled barbed wire and metal gates guard them. They were the first sign of how the profits from the heroin and yaba trade have turned Pangshang into one of the most unlikely, and least known, boomtowns in Asia. It is the jungle equivalent of an offshore tax haven, where no questions are asked providing you have cash and connections. Equally incongruous in this remote enclave was the parade of new cars roaring up and down the streets, sending up huge clouds of dust that hung in the air, interspersed by the elongated golf carts that act as buses in Pangshang.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

These vehicles in certain respects were like a bank, with the crucial difference that they were not subject to regulation. Moving risks to these SPVs was possible due to loopholes in the existing regulatory framework. And even if regulators had wanted to go after such SPVs they could not have done so because these legal entities were set up in places like the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, and other regulatory and tax havens. Banks then issued guarantees to the SPVs, which in turn enabled them to issue short-term liabilities (so-called asset-backed commercial papers) to outside investors. These investors often were very large insurance companies or mutual funds that could not have invested in risky loans but were allowed to purchase these seemingly riskless securities.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

* * * The Panama Canal bridges the land gap between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the law firm Mossack Fonseca, its office in Panama, provides a bridge between open markets and dark money. The firm, started by the German Jurgen Mossack in 1977, had risen to become the world’s fourth-largest offshore law firm. By 2016 it was operating a global network of forty-two franchises, with significant subsidiaries scattered in the world’s most advantageous tax havens. The firm catered to the rich, the powerful, and those seeking to keep their transactions private. That is, until April 2016. The largest leak of confidential information ever hit the presses on April 3, 2016, when 2.6 terabytes of data, containing 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

Johnson with Alexander Nazaryan, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 2. The public frets about cheating with food stamps: Emelyn Rude, “The Very Short History of Food Stamp Fraud in America,” Time, March 30, 2017. zillionaires hide assets abroad: Gabriel Zucman, “The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens,” University of California at Berkeley, presentation, September 2015. He calculates that $36 billion is lost to the Treasury each year because of hidden assets. This is only a small share of tax cheating. Overall, the IRS has estimated that people owe $458 billion annually in taxes that they don’t pay, and follow-ups suggest that this underpayment is largely from very wealthy people.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

It will have to persuade corporations to invest, in spite of the higher taxes, regulations, and workers’ rights they will face. It will have to convince the City and businesses that paying toward an upgraded infrastructure is better for them than hoarding capital in the form of low-risk securities or in offshore tax havens. Most difficult of all, it will now have to manage the giant task of Brexit, an economic and political minefield. The issue of whether to leave the European Union was settled by the referendum, but the issues of single-market membership and free movement were not. And while pundits may have overestimated just how much people care about Europe per se, the issue of migration cuts to the heart of a cultural and generational divide in Britain today.


pages: 322 words: 99,918

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

Lego produces 400 million tyres a year for its vehicles, making it officially the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world. Oh, and seven Lego sets are sold every second. There goes another one. And another. And another. Ole Kirk Christiansen’s grandson, Kjeld, now owns the company, making him the richest man in Denmark. But he eschews tropical tax havens or the bright lights of Copenhagen and chooses to live in Billund, the tiny town where it all started. Lego HQ is still based in the Jutland backwater and high-flying folk from all over the world are encouraged to meet with the toymaker in the rear end of actual nowhere. The Kirk Christiansens haven’t just made Billund their home, they’ve paid for the town to have its own airport (the second biggest in Denmark, in a town of just over 6,000 people) a church, a community centre, a school, a youth club and a library.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

It was exempted from several taxes, and the government initially claimed that its ownership was a “trade secret.”56 A government official who spoke out against the contract was fired, and a journalist reporting on it was sentenced to twelve years in prison, a decision that was later revised to a fine and community service.57 The road was a triple loss for Tajik citizens, who were not employed in large numbers to build it, have to pay more out of pocket to use it, and will likely have to pay again through public taxes since toll receipts are going to a tax haven rather than paying down the loan.58 In Kyrgyzstan, Chinese-financed projects have been inflated to enrich local elites. For one road project, cement was billed at $1.10 per kilogram, when it could have been obtained for $0.07 on the local market. Chinese contractors and Kyrgyz officials overseeing a power-plant project in Bishkek, financed by a $386 million loan from China’s Export-Import Bank, authorized invoices for $320 pliers and $1,600 fire extinguishers, among other inflated expenses.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

They admit they’re not perfect and are invariably changing toward something new. They remain unfinished and thus cannot be expected to be stable. They will never reach 100 percent confidence—but then again, what can? Even death and taxes are potentially avoidable, in light of the millions of dollars being pumped into cryonics and the billions stashed in Caribbean or Swiss tax havens. Computer software that has passed beta and is released into the wild, only to find a bug that remained hidden during its testing phase, is not a stain on modernity’s notion of truth and perfection. It’s rather the truth of life, a truth without end. A “beta” next to a program logo or title provides us a Franco Moretti–like distance from finitude.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

It had been announced in December 2015 with a big media rollout. And yet initial praise for the foundation, to which he dedicated the majority of his wealth, was overshadowed by skeptical news reports that fixated on the decision to set it up as a limited liability corporation, noting that this designation provided a tax haven for the young billionaire couple. Buffeted by several days of negative stories, Zuckerberg called Sandberg and Elliot Schrage, who had helped strategize the press rollout, from his vacation home in Hawaii, screaming that they had screwed up. It was an uncharacteristic display of anger that reflected Zuckerberg’s frustration with his difficulty at winning over public goodwill.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

Like air hostesses, residents of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau traversed international borders almost continuously, sometimes travelling from Belgium to the Netherlands and back again just to cross the street in front of their homes. Within the towns many services were duplicated, with two electrical systems, two postal services, two police departments, even two mayors. Each house apparently paid taxes in the country where its front door was located, so – as The Ultimate Guide to Offshore Tax Havens advised moguls – houses on the border needed only to move their front doors in order to cut their tax bills. For Dutch people used to shops remaining closed on Sundays, living a few metres from Belgian stores was another obvious advantage. According to one legal textbook, police officers had sometimes even used buildings on the border to interrogate witnesses, who could sit in the same room as their questioners but in another country, safe from fear of arrest.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

And just as in that game there are winners and losers in the real city too. So who does own London? It is surprisingly difficult to find out. There are plenty of people who do not want the public to find the names on a particular lease. According to a Private Eye investigation, over 42,000 commercial and residential properties in London were purchased through offshore tax havens.4 As a result, the records of ownership are fiendishly difficult to uncover and a Freedom of Information request to the Land Registry will produce little beyond a company name based on an island often thousands of miles from the Thames. There are many reasons for people to hide their identity and their wealth in such ways.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

The Gross Domestic Product per capita in China in 2009 was in fact less than one-tenth that of Japan.{554} None of the countries with the five highest Gross Domestic Products were among those with the five highest GDP per capita, all of the latter being very small countries that were not necessarily comparable to the major nations that dominate the list of countries with the largest Gross Domestic Products. Some small countries like Bermuda are tax havens that attract the wealth of rich people from other countries, who may or may not become citizens while officially having a residence in the tax-haven country. But the fact that the Gross Domestic Product per capita of Bermuda is higher than that of the United States does not mean that the average permanent resident of Bermuda has a higher standard of living than the average American.


pages: 438 words: 109,306

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World by Adam Lebor

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, foreign exchange controls, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute cuisine, IBM and the Holocaust, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, special drawing rights

“A Leaf Being Turned,” Occupy Economics, London, 29 October, 2012, available at http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2012/speech616.pdf. Hudson, Manley, O. “The Immunities of the Bank for International Settlements,” American Journal of International Law, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Jan. 1938), 128–134. Johanssen, Niels and Gabriel Zucman. “The End of Bank Secrecy? An Evaluation of the G20 Tax Haven Crackdown,” Working Paper 2012–04, Paris School of Economics, February 2012. Keynes, J. M. “The Bank for International Settlements, Fourth Annual Report, 1933–34,” Economic Journal, Vol. 44, No. 175. September 1934, 514–518. Kriz, M.A. “The Bank for International Settlements: Wartime Activities and Present Position,” (Revised), Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Foreign Research Division, June 11, 1947.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

However, the notion that only the rich need be taxed to restore government finances to health has to be set against the fact that the incentive effects on dulling the desire to work may well be higher for the rich (because they do not work to live), and they are also probably better able to avoid taxes by moving to tax havens or through tax planning. In all likelihood, all of us will have to tighten our belts. Summary and Conclusion American overconsumption is driven by policies that were framed in reaction to growing public perceptions of inequality and insecurity, and these policies have contributed to financial-sector excess.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The real story is that for-profit technology companies deliberately set out to make money from piracy and never came up with a workable plan to pay artists. Although Shawn Fanning sincerely wanted to find a better way to distribute music and Napster negotiated with labels, Grokster and Kazaa—based in the offshore tax havens of Nevis and Vanuatu, respectively—didn’t really try. Even with the growth in online distribution, sales of recorded music in the United States were worth $6.3 billion in 2009—less than half their 1999 value of $14.6 billion.5 The music business became trapped in a downward spiral: starved for revenue, major and indie labels alike have laid off thousands of staffers, dropped hundreds of artists, and cut investment in recording, marketing, and tour support.


The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

Microsoft and others follow suit. 2001: The volume of a-mail for the first time exceeds conventional post; 600 million smart cards in use world-wide. 2002: The first information Rights scandal breaks out: medical information is being used to blackmail people into purchasing from one specific on-line supplier. As all relevant databases have been accumulated in a tax-haven island in the Pacific, no legal recourse is obtained. 2003: Koreans require by law 'positive ID implants' into new-born children. 2006: Repression of the 'global job riots', most violent in US cities. 2010: Private corporate scrip currencies exceed national currencies in commercial exchange volume for the first time. 2015: Tax-slashing promises are fulfilled by privatising the remaining essential services in the UK. 2020: The last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom retires.


pages: 350 words: 103,270

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Unlike in a real company, where assets, revenues, and debt payments all involve real people and endless debate, the SPV doppelganger is an android, programmed by a lawyer-crafted set of rules to mechanically transfer cash between various Cayman Islands mailboxes (in this world, the taxman is just another unpredictable creditor, best kept at bay by using a tax haven). To bring Barclays Capital and cautious investors like LB Kiel together, it was not enough for Usi to simply transfer risky assets such as Mexican loans to an SPV and ask hate-to-lose investors to lend it money. After all, they would only have to take a peek at the assets inside and ask for the same compensation they would have demanded if they had bought the assets separately.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Germany’s high-tech exports can survive a strong Euro, but Greece, Spain, and Portugal cannot export successfully under a strong Euro and their already severe economic crises can become much worse. The Irish will have serious problems, and their export problems would have been crippling if they were not a corporate income tax haven. Italy’s, particularly southern Italy’s, ability to export successfully is dubious.23 If the US dollar tumbles, that hurts China and other countries with fixed exchange rates; they feel pressured to drop their peg or revalue their currencies higher. Countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar have had to resort to currency interventions and a massive buildup of foreign reserves to stop their currencies from appreciating.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

In some of the German federal states, there’s no tuition at all. Imagine. Even in the German states that do charge, the cost is a few hundred euros a year—about the cost of a day of class at some private American schools. Yes, but what about the higher taxes? Well, it’s odd: I think of Europe as a tax haven. After all, we pay up to four-fifths of what they pay in taxes. But we hardly get back four-fifths of a European-type welfare state. Still, I went for years waiting for an explanation as to where I’d be better off. It seems the bookstores should groan with tomes that compare Europe v. the U.S. to tell me where I’m better off.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

This might seem a bit peculiar given that none of the money comes from Bermuda, the cable goes nowhere near Bermuda, and Nynex is centered in the northeastern United States. But since FLAG is ultimately owned and controlled by a Bermuda company and the capacity on the cable is sold out of Bermuda, the invoices all come out of Bermuda and the money all comes into Bermuda, which by an odd coincidence happens to be a major corporate tax haven. Nynex also has responsibility for building the FLAG cable system. One might think that a Baby Bell such as Nynex would be a perfect choice for this kind of work, but, in fact, Nynex owned none of the factories needed to manufacture cable, none of the ships needed to lay it, and not enough of the expertise needed to install it.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Being one-time levies because of the “debt emergency,” even if you factor in “expectations effects,” such policies should not lead to dramatic changes in investment behavior or capital flight provided that the state credibly commits to keeping them as a one-off tax.45 And just as in the United States, the space for more taxation in Europe at the top end of the distribution seems to be quite ample, as top marginal incomes are estimated to be no less than 20 percentage points below those that would maximize tax revenue to the government.46 Peter Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Emanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, go further, arguing that taxing the top 1 percent at over 80 percent would raise, not lower, revenue.47 They argue explicitly that “very high earners should be subject to high and rising marginal tax rates.”48 According to their calculations, raising the average income tax for the top income percentile to 43.5 percent from 22.4 percent, the level of 2007, would raise revenue by 3 percent of GDP, which is enough to close the US structural deficit while still leaving very high earners with more after-tax income than they would have had under Nixon.49 Finally, there are pots of gold offshore too. With all that money going to the top of the income distribution over the past thirty years an entire industry sprang up to hide it. Unfortunately, they hid it in plain sight in a handful of tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. If big, powerful states want to go after it, they know exactly where to look, which is what they have been doing of late.50 Indeed, a new study by James Henry of the Tax Justice Network estimates that there is as much as 32 trillion dollars, which is over twice the entire US national debt, hidden away offshore not paying taxes, which makes for a very tempting target indeed.51 Think about this for a moment.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Though the owners had passionately-held views about how Britain should be run, none of them experienced the normal lives of the average reader who would be affected by the fate they wished on the country. Murdoch isn’t even British, and spends little time in this country. The Barclay Brothers tend to divide their time between the tax haven of Monaco and the bizarre crenellated castle they built on a tiny island off Sark. Their tax arrangements – involving numerous secretive offshore funds and family trusts in order to minimise contributing to the public purse – are eye-wateringly complex. Richard Desmond has been similarly criticised on a number of occasions for his complicated ways of avoiding paying tax.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Globalization and new technology have created an economy in which those with highly valued skills or talents can earn huge rewards. Inequality inevitably rises. Attempting to reduce inequality via redistributive taxation is likely to fail because the global elite can easily move to another tax jurisdiction or a tax haven. Insofar as increased taxation does hit the rich, it will deter wealth creation, so we all end up poorer. One strange thing about these arguments, whatever their merits, is how they stand in stark contrast to the economic orthodoxy that existed from roughly 1945 to 1980, which held that rising inequality was not inevitable and that various government policies could reduce it.


pages: 369 words: 107,073

Madoff Talks: Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History by Jim Campbell

algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, currency risk, delta neutral, family office, fear of failure, financial thriller, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, Jim Simons, margin call, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, time value of money, two and twenty, walking around money

REFORMING FEEDER FUNDS Mike Ocrant, former editor of the leading hedge fund information source, was unsparing in his assessment: “The guys who ran Fairfield Greenwich were a bunch of crooks.”19 Madoff believed there remained an uncovered and explosive hedge fund scandal: “Jim, I can assure you this entire hedge fund business from the tax havens are the biggest scandal yet to be exposed. I will give you the key to this issue. It’s the extreme leverage the hedge funds provided their clients; combined with non-disclosed cash in offshore clients’ bank accounts that earned next to nothing because the banks knew the advantage to the beneficial owners was the secrecy of the deposit accounts.


pages: 464 words: 117,495

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management by Alexander Elder

additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, computerized trading, deliberate practice, diversification, Elliott wave, endowment effect, fear index, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, price stability, psychological pricing, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, short selling, South Sea Bubble, systematic trading, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, tulip mania, zero-sum game

Many traders spend thousands of dollars searching for magic that will turn a few pages of computer code into an endless stream of money. People who pay for automatic trading systems are like medieval knights who paid alchemists for the secret of turning base metals into gold. Complex human activities do not lend themselves to automation. Computerized learning systems have not replaced teachers, and programs for doing taxes haven't created unemployment among accountants. Most human activities call for an exercise of judgment; machines and systems can help but not replace humans. Had there been a successful automatic trading system, its purchaser could move to Tahiti and spend the rest of his life at leisure, supported by a stream of checks from his broker.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Wolf acknowledged to New York magazine that one motive was his desire to have a friend in the White House and how he was impressed by his early access to Obama. But Wolf was also impressed by Obama’s views, and for him one issue that really mattered was Iraq. Wolf liked Obama’s strong and early stand against the war. And Wolf liked Obama despite the fact that he had introduced a Senate bill to crack down on offshore tax havens and had promised to go after such accounts if elected president—none of which was good news to UBS, which has been the single biggest target of federal investigators probing offshore accounts. The shift toward Democrats has been more gradual in other areas of finance, such as private equity firms.


pages: 549 words: 116,200

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

A sprinkling of FOR RENT signs. A construction site that hadn't had anyone working on it for a week now, the padlocked foreman's shed growing a mossy coat of graffiti. 2102 Leon didn't mind. He'd lived rough -- not just student-rough, either. His parents had gone to Anguilla from Romania, chasing the tax-haven set, dreaming of making a killing working as bookkeepers, security guards. They'd mistimed the trip, arrived in the middle of an econopocalytpic collapse and ended up living in a vertical slum that had once been a luxury hotel. The sole Romanians among the smuggled Mexicans who were de-facto slaves, they'd traded their ability to write desperate letters to the Mexican consulate for Spanish lessons for Leon.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

In the 1990s, it started securitizing riskier loans to borderline borrowers who as a class came to be known as subprime. Wall Street’s securitization wizards also made use of a relatively new accounting trick called “off-balance-sheet accounting.” Banks created trusts or shell companies in offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands or Dublin. The trusts would buy loans, stick them in a “warehouse,” and package them up like Christmas presents with bows on top (all through the cybermagic of electronic transfers). The bank didn’t need to set aside much capital on its balance sheet, since it didn’t own the loans.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

As a mental model, punching above your weight occurs any time you try to perform at a higher level than is expected of you, even outside a competitive context. Examples include joining a group made up of more accomplished members or writing an op-ed on a subject on which you are not yet a recognized expert. On the macro scale, whole countries punch above their weight when they engage in prominent roles on the world stage, such as Ireland serving as a tax haven for major corporations. Given the inherent disadvantage of being the smaller player, you should engage in this type of fight only when you can deploy guerrilla tactics that you believe will tilt the game in your favor. If that’s the case, though, you may actively seek out these types of conflicts because punching above your weight can have many benefits.


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Financial transactions taxes could be an important part of a reform package that seeks to remake the financial sector so that it better serves the larger economy.”3 Critics argue that in the globalized financial environment of the twenty-first century, no single country can implement such a tax; that it’s good in theory, but would somehow have to be introduced simultaneously in all major economies to stop finance simply migrating to tax-haven states. American opposition to such changes explains why the UK didn’t expand its stock trade tax into a more general financial transaction tax, and Britain’s opposition in turn explained the reason why the European Union shied away from such a tax despite support for it in France and other large economies.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

In late 1996 it reported that in 1993–95, about a quarter of direct foreign investment in the Western Hemisphere (apart from Canada) was in Bermuda. The figures for majority-owned foreign affiliates of US corporations (other than banks) were about a quarter in Bermuda and another 15% in Panama, the British Caribbean islands and other tax havens. Most of the rest seems to be short-term speculative money—picking up assets in, say, Brazil. Now, they’re not building manufacturing plants in Bermuda. The most benign interpretation is that it’s some form of tax evasion. Quite possibly it’s narco-capital. The OECD [the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group representing the 29 richest nations] estimates that more than half of all narco-money—something like $250 billion—goes through US banks each year.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

Banks on Wall Street and in the City of London create elaborate schemes to ensure that the bonuses they pay aren’t taxable or can be tax-deferred. And those schemes relate to onshore money‌—‌the stuff the taxman has some chance of learning about. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund estimates that some $18 trillion in assets are being held in offshore tax havens beyond the reach of any tax authority.12 The result is that the tax rates visible from the official statistics are almost certainly overstated. The rich are richer than we think and pay less tax than we can credit. The position has become so extreme that even the billionaires are protesting. In a bold, truthful, un-Ponzi-ish op-ed for the New York Times, Warren Buffett wrote: Our leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Globally, almost as many migrants are women as men.9 Three-quarters are of working age.10 And while most migrants move to work or study, three in eight migrants in the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are the spouses, children or relatives of migrants (who also often work once they arrive).11 In proportion When I first visited the Gulf region, I gamely tried out the few words of Arabic that I knew on taxi drivers and hotel staff, such as shukraan (thank you). But I would get bemused responses, or none at all – and not just because of my terrible accent. Most people working in the Gulf aren’t from there. In Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the other members of the United Arab Emirates eight in nine residents were born abroad. Tiny tax havens such as Liechtenstein and Monaco also have a majority of foreign residents. Some poorer small countries also have lots of immigrants: more than a quarter of the population of Lebanon was born abroad, notably many Palestinian and Syrian refugees. In countries such as the US and the UK where the backlash against immigration has been particularly severe, many people believe that immigration is exceptionally high.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

Still, having a paperwork factory on hand was no doubt useful if a business ran into trouble with its Merchant ID. The identity of Wirecard’s clients was also protected from public sight by routing the paper trail of ownership from Consett back through one of the main secrecy providers, the British Virgin Islands, a tropical tax haven favoured by criminals, private equity groups and oligarchs. Payments to the various online casinos, pornographers and quack pill suppliers processed in this way went into accounts at Wirecard Bank in Germany in the name of the Consett companies, controlled by the unseen owners. It was a lot of effort to go to if you had nothing to hide.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

According to The Economist, in the years to 2020, the largest American tech firms paid a tax rate of around 16 per cent of their profits, far below the then 35 per cent corporate US tax rate.49 Their methods can be ingenious. One loophole, long beloved by the American technology titans, was the ‘Double Irish’, in which large companies put their intangible intellectual property in an Irish-registered company controlled from a tax haven such as Bermuda. Ireland considers the firm to be offshore, but the US considers it Irish.50 And the profits? Well, the profits remain untaxed. This practice has started to go out of vogue, and after the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Donald Trump’s administration clamped down on the Double Irish, at least one technology company brought it to an end in 2020.51 In general, governments have been caught off guard by the rapidity with which the Exponential Age titans have grown.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

He then devised the encryption code separately, and altered the educational program so that it wouldn’t open unless the ransomware had been installed. Aiming to stay within the law, he framed the shakedown as a voluntary licensing agreement. He also took the precaution of locating PC Cyborg in Panama, a tax haven with strict bank secrecy laws. On a visit home to Ohio in 1989, Popp did give his friend Ronald Schilb a preview of his creation. Schilb worried about running the disk on his new Apple computer. “I remember thinking that I did not want to mess up my new computer because I didn’t have the money to buy another or have it fail on me,” he said.


pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

Khadija determined to pick up where Elmar Huseynov had left off, though she didn’t know the first thing about investigating fraud and corruption in government, or how to follow the money flowing through the state-owned oil company, or how to locate the offshore shell companies used to obscure that money trail. She turned for training and advice to the OCCRP, which was co-founded the same year by Paul Radu and Drew Sullivan. Paul put her onto an early data leak of financial documents out of Panama identifying the owners of shell companies operating in known tax havens around the world. Some of the documents pointed to Aliyev and his family, and Khadija meticulously connected the dots and then bravely published her findings in Azerbaijan. “This was a huge breakthrough,” says Paul Radu. “Up to this point, the Aliyev family was operating in the dark. Khadija was the one who pulled the curtain.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Bianca Hall, “Life on Manus Island: Disease, Heat and Suffering,” The Age, January 5, 2013. 12Jamie Walker, “ALP Asylum Solution Built to Last,” Australian, February 2–3, 2013. 13Sarah Whyte and Michael Gordon, “Sexual Abuse, Rape Threats Alleged by Nauru Asylum Seekers,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 30, 2014. 14Georgina Wilkins, “Don’t Do It: Plea from Survivor,” The Age, August 15, 2012. 15Jo Chandler, “Welcome to Manus, the Island That Has Been Changed Forever by Australian Asylum Seekers,” Guardian, December 16, 2014. 16Ben Doherty, “Transfield Immigration Staff Told They Can Be Fired for Using Facebook,” Guardian, April 7, 2015. 17Lauren Wilson and Lanai Vasek, “Bowen Confirms Detention Blowout,” Australian, May 5, 2011. 18David Marr, “The Indian Ocean Solution: Christmas Island,” Monthly, September 2009. 19Peter Mares, “Private Detention Centres Reap Mammoth Profits,” ABC Radio’s PM, November 23, 2000. 20Susannah Moran, “Detention Contractor Returns Record Profit,” Australian, May 23, 2012. 21Michael West, “It Costs More to House a Detainee on Manus Island for a Day than a Night at 5-star Sydney Hotel,” The Age, June 5, 2014. 22Sonia Kohlbacher and Paige Taylor, “Deal Signed for Manus Upgrade,” Australian, September 8, 2014. 23Ben Butler and Georgia Wilkins, “Big Bills and Tax Havens: The Business of Immigration Detention,” The Age, February 28, 2014. 24Nick Evershed, “Mandatory Immigration Detention Is a Billion-Dollar Business—Analysis,” Guardian, August 25, 2014. 25Soon after Transfield secured the $1.2 billion contract to run Nauru and Manus Island, the company’s head of the legal and risk division, Kate Munnings, told the Australian that asylum seekers must be “provided for in a way that’s humane and respectful.”


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

A child’s home-made kite – a sheet of rice-paper on the thinnest of wooden frames – hangs from a wall, the pye-dogs scuttle from their shade when you approach and sulk at a distance. Few visitors call. All that is now left of the British Empire to which India belonged are fourteen territories, political curiosities scattered across the oceans of the world, known perhaps to stamp collectors or corporate lawyers seeking a tax haven. They are mainly islands and bring no discernible benefit to Britain, which seems to regard them as a form of charity work, dispatching a governor ready to turn out at formal events in a plumed hat (as long as the local people will pay for such a thing) and happy to let the Girl Guides camp in the gardens of the Residence.


pages: 550 words: 124,073

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The rich can in some measure reduce their tax burden by recording some of their profits in offshore tax shelters, as uncovered in the leaked Panama and Paradise Papers. Of course, this has always been true (think Switzerland), and tax authorities are in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with corporations and wealthy individuals to try to close loopholes and clamp down on outright tax evasion. The OECD estimates that the use of tax havens cost governments worldwide about 240 billion in 2015 (“After a Tax Crackdown, Apple found a New Shelter for Its Profits,” New York Times, November 6, 2017). That is a considerable number, but it must be kept in perspective: it amounts to less than 0.05 percent of the OECD GDP (and about 0.03 percent of worldwide GDP). 14.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

It’s not clear how much money Lansman has ploughed into Momentum, but the Lansman family (Lansman’s brother and son) look after a network of more than twenty property and investment companies, one with reported links to Luxembourg, and hold assets well into the millions. Given the Labour Party’s vociferous opposition to tax havens and the companies that use them to avoid tax, the Lansmans’ links to Luxembourg could leave the Momentum founder open to charges of hypocrisy. Many privately educated members of the Labour Party, including Tony Benn, have been attracted to far-left politics. No one doubts Benn’s beliefs were honestly held.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

This creates an incentive for some states to position themselves as leaders in the field of gene manipulation, though there will be a very strong temptation for them to participate in forms of genetic engineering that are considered ethically unacceptable and that can conjure up thoughts of eugenics and natural selection. The introduction of binding global standards and legal frameworks in this area will help prevent a practice of ethical arbitrage by more opportunistic states that may look to create ethical paradises in the same way that others create fiscal paradises (e.g., tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands). A number of codes and standards already exist, but they largely rely on scientists’ willingness to follow them.23 In a context where privately funded research competes with government research institutes and universities, and where governments are competing with each other, observance of these codes may be scant.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

The meticulous Fisher, though, had spent the preceding months building up an impressive library of detailed policy documents. The shadow Treasury team, meanwhile, had been costing specific ideas. If corporation tax was restored to its 2011 levels, what would it raise? How much revenue could be amassed by a clampdown on tax havens? Needing somewhere quiet to concentrate, Fisher was often holed up in his Croydon home. Sometimes, he would take half days in Southside, then get the train back to south London and work through the night. With the Corbyn project’s emphasis on grassroots political participation, the membership were asked which issues and policies they thought were most important.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

But it never really did. One result of all that secrecy is that it allows Apple to more tightly control its message and keep the focus expressly on the products and away from its more controversial practices—conditions in the factories that manufacture the phones, say, or its offshoring of $240 billion in tax havens in Ireland. Or even less controversial things, like the role a particular employee played in developing the iPhone. Apple has essentially cultivated a new set of norms among the public and the tech press—no access, no official comment, no transparency. So I called up the editor of the Atlantic’s tech section, Adrienne LaFrance, who had recently written a treatise on the neutering of the tech press.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

I suppose I fucked up when I gave away my interview with Goldman Sachs. I could have been invited to Blackrock’s party. I could be feasting at the Vultures’ picnic. I can still go—as the food. I have a better idea. Jones called from Television Centre London. He’s got the shit on FG Hemispheres, another Vulture. I’ll have to fly to the Isle of Man, the tax haven in the middle of the English Channel, then the Congo. Jones is making me hungry. I hear vulture tastes like chicken. The twins and Badpenny have just surprised me right as I’m typing this. They’re marching over here to this picnic table with a birthday cake burning enough candles to make it look like an oil well on fire.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

To make things more complicated, as globalization had accelerated, many of these same Indian companies had rushed to go global, snapping up mining assets in Africa or building industrial projects in Britain. This created an additional problem for those trying to scrutinize their finances, because it meant that some portion of their cash, as well as potentially quite a large chunk of their loans, was stored somewhere far offshore and often funneled through tax havens. All of this meant that analysts like Gupta could find out fairly easily how funds had been raised for any single new investment project, such as a steel mill or power plant. At the level of the conglomerate itself, however, no one except the “promoter”—as India’s tycoons were often known—knew the real extent of their borrowing, or from whom it had been borrowed.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

There were no primary challengers to congressional leaders who had opposed (or had not facilitated) policies that might dampen inequality. Almost no seats were lost because of protester demands. None of the conversation that the movement sparked on how to tax the rich—a tax on financial transactions, restoring tax rates to pre-Reagan-era levels, closing corporate tax loopholes, going after offshore tax havens—led to substantive policy changes in the next four years. As of 2016, inequality had only gotten worse (in the United States, at least), and even basic provisions like food stamps were being cut.35 Occupy’s impressive narrative capacity was not matched by electoral or institutional capacity partly because of emergent conditions of the movement and partly because of the cumulative choices of its participants.


pages: 457 words: 143,967

The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market by Philip Augar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business logic, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, family office, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hiring and firing, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, light touch regulation, loadsamoney, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Sloane Ranger, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, vertical integration, wikimedia commons, yield curve

Barclays immediately won an injunction to get them removed but the story was out. Cable told the Sunday Times: ‘The documents suggest a deeply ingrained culture of tax avoidance. The Barclays team looks like the spider at the centre of a highly artificial web of non-transparent transactions through tax havens.’6 The Protium deal drew further attention to SCM and needed regulatory approval. Barclays’ August board meeting was told that the FSA was approaching Protium cautiously. The board, however, gave more weight to management’s arguments that Protium would provide a positive message to the market about Barclays’ risk management capabilities.


The Cleaner: The True Story of One of the World’s Most Successful Money Launderers by Bruce Aitken

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", air freight, airport security, Asian financial crisis, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, foreign exchange controls, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, profit motive, risk/return, South China Sea

The solution was provided by Tim Milner who, while investing his own earnings in a Hong Kong-based finance house, Deak & Company, became particularly friendly with an American banker named Bruce Aitken, friendly enough to admit that the money he was investing came from the drug business. “Unfazed by the revelation, Aitken calmly offered to launder Milner’s cash, first moving it around the world’s money markets and then ultimately into offshore accounts and tax havens, for a modest commission. So efficient was Aitken that he was soon performing a similar service for them and for others. Within a year Aitken had quit his job at Deak and set up his own company, First Financial Services Ltd. His work consisted almost entirely of moving money for marijuana traffickers.”


pages: 473 words: 132,344

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, falling living standards, fiat currency, fixed income, full employment, German hyperinflation, housing crisis, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, risk/return, strikebreaker, trade route, zero-sum game

Systemic and ingrained social problems apart, the problem for the eurozone countries that have been forced to accept ‘bail-out’ loans on what seem like draconian terms is that, unlike Germany, they do not have broad-based economies. The latest, Cyprus, for instance, developed an identity, in the last decades of the twentieth century, as a tax haven, especially favoured by Russian businessmen. Like British author Somerset Maugham’s pre-war French Riviera, Cyprus became a ‘sunny place for shady people’. Formerly a British colony, Cyprus had remained a British military base, with, back in the 1970s, agriculture and tourism as its other main earners.


pages: 455 words: 138,716

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

Since modern finance is an almost completely global enterprise, the major players can make a habit of regulator shopping. A large number of financial companies base their trading operations in London, for instance, because the regulatory framework there for certain kinds of trades (particularly derivative trades) is even weaker than in the United States. Other companies place subsidiaries in tax havens or other foreign locales and park profits there. In one sense, the maneuverings by Contogouris and Morgan Keegan and the hedge funds occurred everywhere—in New York (where many key emails and phone calls originated), in Toronto (where executives were followed and prank-called), in Washington (where key figures attempted to involve the SEC in investigations), in New Jersey (where Crum & Forster was located and a number of defendants kept offices), in London (where Contogouris met with FBI agents), and really all over the world, where potential investors received false information and moved the value of Fairfax stock by buying and selling shares.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

FLIP and OPIS were generally marketed only to people who had capital gains in excess of $10 million for FLIP and $20 million for OPIS. These shelters were designed to generate substantial phony capital losses (i.e., in excess of $10 million for FLIP and in excess of $20 million for OPIS) through the use of an entity created in the Cayman Islands (a tax haven), for purposes of the tax shelter transaction. The client purportedly entered into an “investment” transaction with the Cayman Islands entity by purchasing a purported warrant or entering into a purported swap. The Cayman Islands entity then made a pre-arranged series of purported investments, including the purchase from either Bank A (which at the time was a KPMG audit client) or Bank D of either Bank A or Bank D stock using money purportedly loaned by Bank A or Bank D, followed by redemptions of those stock purchases by the pertinent bank.


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

The new wave of wealthy immigrants flocking from Europe to Manhattan are seeking to escape their own economic plagues. These refugees, unlike earlier immigrants, do not flee famine or religious persecution. But, like their predecessors, they see their old world crumbling. They fear higher taxes, political instability, terrorism and kidnappings. The oceans offer safety. Manhattan offers tax havens, security, the good life. “In 1965 if I saw a friend from Paris, I would cross the street,” Jean de Noyer, owner of Manhattan’s fashionable La Goulue restaurant, told a reporter. “Now I just wave.…” Wealthy Europeans view their tax laws as confiscatory and the labor unions as too powerful. The British Empire is preserved in history books.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

You needed to head off an antitrust prosecution such as the one the Department of Justice brought against Microsoft in the 1998. You needed to deter nettlesome regulations over how you used the bounty of personal data that your online platforms were collecting. And you needed to stave off efforts to clamp down on the offshore tax havens in which you stashed your gargantuan profits. So it was that a whole new set of clients came knocking at the doors of Cassidy & Associates and their rivals. In 2002, Google had spent less than $50,000 on lobbyists; by 2015, it was spending $5 million in a single quarter, making it the third-biggest corporate lobbyist.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Although the politicians in Washington would never admit this, the reality is that taxes are not for everyone, just the middle class and the working poor. The way the tax laws are structured, those with a smart tax attorney can see gaping loopholes that the majority of Americans simply cannot. All sorts of legal maneuvering through tax shelters, trusts, and corporate structuring can shave large percentages off of the bill. Tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and Jersey are simply not options for the general public if they even know where they are and what they do in the first place. The data demonstrate that the U.S. individual income tax continues to be very progressive, according to the government. These are some of their tax figures from 2015: • There were 141.2 million taxpayers that reported total earnings of $10.14 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.45 trillion in individual income taxes


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

“I share the president-elect’s goal of economically empowering every citizen,” Mnuchin had said. The Democratic politicians vetting Mnuchin for the job were not reassured. Over five hours of questioning, they took him to task for many apparent offenses: the fact that his hedge fund had registered to an offshore tax haven in the Cayman Islands (he said the move was something pensions and other investors demanded, not a personal tax dodge), that he had initially failed to disclose nearly $100 million in real estate holdings (he said the forms were complicated), and that it took too long for him to file his complete financial disclosures (seriously, seriously complicated).


Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Prince Franz Josef II was the first ruler to live in the castle above the capital city of Vaduz. He died in 1989 and was succeeded by his son, Prince Hans-Adam II. Liechtenstein has no military service and its minuscule army was disbanded in 1868. It is known for wine production, postage stamps, dentures and its status as a tax haven. In 2000 Liechtenstein’s financial and political institutions were rocked by allegations that money laundering was rife in the country. In response to international outrage, banks agreed to stop allowing customers to bank money anonymously. But the principality remains under pressure to introduce more reforms.

Scandal rocked the principality again in 2008 when it was discovered that more than 1000 high-flying Germans had evaded tax by depositing large sums of money in trusts run by a Liechtenstein bank partly owned by the royal family. Liechtenstein didn’t dispute that such money could have wound up in its banks (tax evasion is not considered a crime). It was, at that time, considered an uncooperative country by the OECD (that is, a tax haven), but it accused Germany of spying. The country bowed to pressure in 2009 and began exchanging information with the British government. It was removed from the list of uncooperative countries that same year. Food & Drink Liechtenstein’s cuisine borrows from its larger neighbours, and it is generally good quality but expensive.


pages: 498 words: 153,927

The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Khartoum Gordon, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, placebo effect, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route

China today had been Iraq three years before,* and next it would be some godforsaken site in Africa or deeper Asia or who knows where. He and his family took their two- and three-year postings in their stride; they existed in a world of foreign schools and pen pals and video rentals and The Club and advertisements for tax havens and discussions about exchange rates and vaccinations and trying to learn brand-new languages and dealing with security guards and looking forward to the weekly mail calls from home and having to pay for long-distance telephony and going months without butter or fresh milk and having to eat dinners of baked beans and Danish biscuits from tins and dealing with the afflictions of strange insect bites and crowds who stare at you and of living with unfamiliar and half-worthless coins and listening to odd radio stations playing weird music and driving odd-looking cars and waiting for the six-monthly long-haul flights home.


pages: 469 words: 145,094

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady

anti-communist, Charles Lindbergh, El Camino Real, illegal immigration, index card, long peace, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, Socratic dialogue

Eventually, UBS liquidated all of his assets and transferred them to Landsbanki in Reykjavik. Bobby claimed that he lost a sizable amount in the transaction. In retrospect, it seems quite clear what UBS was doing. Many of its fifty-two thousand accounts were offshore holdings, secretly deposited—many without names, just numbers—as tax havens for American citizens. In Bobby’s case, he was broadcasting, some might say boasting—without cover—that he had $3 million at UBS (he may have even given his account number over the air), and since he’d paid no income tax on it, or on any of his other income since 1977, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service was making its displeasure known to UBS.


pages: 530 words: 154,505

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Nissim Mishal, Uncensored (in Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Books, 2011), 190. Chapter 23: A Concerned Citizen 1. “The Netanyahu Report: Full Version,” Ynet, September 27, 2000. 2. Ari Shavit, “Ben-Zion Netanyahu in a 1998 Interview: ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Palestinian People,’” Haaretz, April 30, 2012. 3. Lilach Weissman, “Netanyahu Held Tax Haven Bank Account,” Globes, January 15, 2014. 4. “Ranking of Richest Politicians in Israel,” Forbes Israel, June 15, 2015. 5. Channel 10 (Israel), The Source, “Bibi Uncensored,” October 9, 2008. 6. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 682. 7. David Landau, Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon (New York: Knopf, 2013), 350–351. 8.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

In the unregulated electronic world, potential employees can be contacted and recruited from almost anywhere and databases and contracts can all be maintained on-line. Akin to the practices of the financial services world, a number of firms such as Sand- line, maintain offices in central locations such as London and Washington, D.C., but are actually registered in more corporate-friendly environs such as the tax havens of the Bahamas or the Caymans. The virtual nature of the structure also provides the potential for a short but profitable organizational half-life. Companies can rapidly dissolve and recreate themselves whenever the need arises (whether due to potential regulation, prosecution, or even the need to shed a poor brand name).


pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Reporting on a southern California Young Americans for Freedom conference held in conjunction with Robert LeFevre’s radically libertarian Rampart College, Gary North, a writer for the conservative newsletter Chalcedon Report, was dismayed by what he found. Instead of studious conservatives affirming faith in God and country, the conference was filled with eccentrics waving the black dollar-sign flag. Enthusiastic libertarians debated proposals to create offshore tax havens and argued over the finer points of Objectivist doctrine. “When the talk drifted into a debate over whether or not Rearden was the true hero of Atlas Shrugged, given the world in which we live, I left,” North reported. He concluded, “I think it is safe to say that YAF is drifting.” 17 North’s reaction was representative.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Many economists, including me, wonder why Greece wants to remain in the eurozone in the first place. The price of membership seems excruciatingly high and getting higher. That said, Greek polling continues to show strong support for keeping the euro. Go figure. By both its words and its deeds, Ireland seems prepared to pay any price—except its status as a corporate tax haven—to remain in the eurozone. Portugal falls somewhere in between, with budget problems like, though not as bad as, Greece’s and a will to stay in the euro that is like, but perhaps not as strong as, Ireland’s. Spain is less secure, though more for its shaky-looking banks than for its public finances, and rather large for a bailout program.


pages: 598 words: 150,801

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Instead, people should be encouraged to acquire wealth unfettered by state regulation, the benefits of which would trickle down the social ladder. The taxation that had paid for post-war welfare must be reduced to encourage wealth acquisition. The wealthiest enjoyed tax cuts, and benefited from the government’s relaxation of restrictions on currency movements. This made financial speculation more attractive and the use of offshore tax havens easier. In 1986 the government deregulated the London stock market, allowing foreign banks to trade there. There were certainly some success stories, as we shall see. But upward mobility declined in the 1980s. And among those most badly affected were the golden generation, especially men. Of the 20 per cent of men born between 1935 and 1955 who were downwardly mobile, the majority experienced their descent during the 1980s.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We are making something which we cannot get by other means.32 By spring 1977 Genentech had acquired a lot more funding and spent some of it on an office for Swanson on an industrial estate near San Francisco airport which eventually expanded into an adjoining warehouse.ii Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1978, when Genentech was focusing on insulin, it still had ‘no products, no salesmen, no full-time scientists, not even its own lab’ as an early account of the period put it.33 In May 1977, the Goodman–Rutter group at UCSF were able to clone rat insulin cDNA, but could not find any expression of the protein.34 On the east coast, Gilbert’s work led to interest from a European venture capital group as well as leading pharmaceutical companies and in March 1978 he helped set up a company called Biogen, along with other leading researchers such as Ken Murray of Edinburgh. With an eye on the main chance, the company was domiciled in the tax haven of the Dutch Antilles, while its central facility was in Geneva, avoiding those tiresome NIH regulations and with Swiss law making it easier for researchers to own patents on their work, without academic employers staking a claim.35 Gilbert admitted to mixed motivations in setting up the company: ‘wanting to do something socially useful, wanting to create an industrial structure, wanting to make something grow, wanting to make money’.36 By May 1978, Gilbert’s group had expressed rat proinsulin in recombinant bacteria (insulin is not a direct gene product, but is synthesised in our cells via a molecule called proinsulin which the cell then modifies into mature insulin), but they still had to take the final, decisive step and repeat the procedure using human cDNA.37 This was not really of much scientific interest – given the success with rat proinsulin cDNA it would be surprising if it did not work – but the potential practical and commercial impact was vast.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

Instead of shoring up the Republican ticket, big money tainted the brand, prolonged the primaries, pushed the candidates to adopt their donors’ pet issues, and, all in all, did the Democrats’ work for them. Romney did nothing to mitigate the “Richie Rich” caricature. After insisting that “corporations are people” and saying, “I like being able to fire people,” he revealed details of a $250 million blind trust crammed with offshore investments in tax havens ranging from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. His description of the $374,000 he made in speaking fees in 2010 as “not very much” sealed his image as hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Americans. The snapshot showing how the 1 percent lived became more toxic still when, under pressure from Gingrich, Romney released his tax returns, revealing that he had paid an effective tax rate of 14 percent on income of $21.7 million.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

The initial suggestion presented an apparently sophisticated way of avoiding the appearance of default: a confiscatory tax on deposits. The Cyprus government refused to impose a tax on large deposit holders of two digits. That is, deposits of more than €100,000 should not be taxed more than 9.9 percent. The tax-haven banking business model shouldn’t be jeopardized. This translated into a tax levy for small deposit holders of 6.7 percent. Adopting this package required that no funds could be withdrawn from banks, and the flow of international capital was shut down. In effect, there was now a Cyprus euro deposit that was not worth the same as euro deposits elsewhere.


pages: 1,181 words: 163,692

Lonely Planet Wales (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, Brexit referendum, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Downton Abbey, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban renewal

There's not a lot to see in Crickhowell itself, but it's a pleasant place for an overnight stop and there's a good clutch of independent shops to peruse. The town's fiercely protective of its locally owned stores, banding together to prevent a supermarket chain opening a branch here in 2015. That rebellious spirit continued with a highly publicised tax revolt, protesting against the ability of large companies to make use of offshore tax havens by grouping together and setting up one of their own. 1Sights & Activities Crug HywelMOUNTAIN (Table Mountain) Distinctive flat-topped Crug Hywel (Hywel's Rock; 451m), better known as Table Mountain, rises to the north of Crickhowell and gave the town its name. You can make a steep but satisfying hike to the impressive remains of an Iron Age fort at the top (3 miles round trip).


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

“Bostwick, Legislative Competition for Corporate Capital,” 7 American Lawyer 136, 140 (1899); Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960, 83–84. 16. On the race to the bottom, see William L. Cary, “Federalism and Corporate Law: Reflections Upon Delaware,” 83 Yale Law Journal 663, 666 (1974). On Delaware, see Leslie Wayne, “How Delaware Thrives as a Corporate Tax Haven,” New York Times, June 30, 2012. 17. See “Tobacco Trust,” Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, ed. Thomas Carson et al. (1999), 1008. 18. American Tobacco’s purchase of MacAndrews and Forbes is detailed in court opinions, including United States v. American Tobacco, 221 U.S. 106 (1911) and United States v.


pages: 561 words: 167,631

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

In fact we can barely keep them from coming up and telling us what to do! So it isn’t that simple. You know that.” “Yes. But now I’m thinking about what it means, I guess. What it means for us. You know Inspector Genette’s people IDed that ship we visited inside Saturn, and they found it belonged to a company in Chad.” “Chad is just a tax haven. Is that why you came down there?” “I suppose. Why not?” “Swan, please leave that part of things to Inspector Genette and his people. It’s time for you to help assemble the inoculants and seed stock and everything we’re going to buy on Earth and ship home.” “All right,” Swan said unhappily. “But I want to stay in touch with the inspector too.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

By the 1970s evangelical leaders had become actively involved in politics after Congress and the IRS began examining their tax-exempt status (especially regarding their unrelated operations like TV stations, bakeries, and whatnot, and also tax subsidies to religious schools that had noxious racial policies).38 Those government actions merely expressed the Enlightenment precept that church and state must be separated and confirmed that cursory denominational affiliation did not operate as a sort of churchy tax haven. They were, however, of grievous consequence to the evangelism industry, which suddenly found an intense interest in politics. Partly, certain crude alignments existed between the conventional Right’s tax wishlist and those of the churches. Just as important, a political turn became inevitable because the original appeal of evangelical churches over the mainline ones lay in hard stances on politicized issues like gay rights—they could hardly be nonpartisan while championing theological issues that were themselves political.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

No wonder Munger says, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”14 The way to wealth is to buy right and hold on. By doing so, an investor minimizes paperwork, transaction costs, and capital gains taxes. To reap genuine riches, one needs to invest in long-term winners and hold on for compounded, tax-free growth. No more effective tax haven exists than unrealized appreciation in a long-lived, soundly growing company. Compounding, combined with patience, is an incredible force over time. In addition to the greater tax outgo, be mindful of the huge impact that tiny frictional costs can have on your net worth in the long run. A small leak can sink a great ship.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Companies buy foreign companies in order to move their nominal headquarters and thereby minimize their tax obligations (‘inversion’). They also charge affiliates for using intangible assets, such as brands, intellectual property or business services, in order to shift profits around (‘transfer pricing’). Not that long ago, only the most buccaneering companies made extensive use of tax havens. Now, leading companies such as Google do. Google achieved an effective tax rate of 2.4 per cent on its non-American profits in 2007–9 by routing profits to Bermuda, via Ireland and the Netherlands, an arrangement known as a double Irish. Thanks to the application of so much brainpower to tax minimization, about 30 per cent of all the world’s foreign direct investment now flows through tax loopholes.27 THE WIDENING DIVIDE What makes the marriage of merit and money particularly dangerous is that it’s taking place at a time when merit and democracy are getting divorced.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

A loophole in the tax code exempted corporations from federal taxes if they were based primarily in the territories. It was one of the many legal anomalies resulting from the Insular Cases, which had denied the automatic extension of federal law to the unincorporated territories. Latching onto it, Muñoz Marín’s government turned Puerto Rico into a tax haven. Mainland corporations were enticed to move to the island with tax holidays, subsidies from the insular treasury, low-interest loans, and other aid. The island’s economy became more tightly linked than ever to that of the mainland. By Muñoz Marín’s reckoning, it was worth it. Operation Bootstrap, as the campaign was called, drew hundreds of mainland firms to Puerto Rico.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

An aspect of financialization little discussed in polite circles is the extent of its criminality. A sizeable fraction of the money sloshing around the world originates in criminal activity – often Russian and Middle Eastern – which is then ‘laundered’ through Special Purpose Vehicles set up in offshore tax havens under fake owners. Much of the laundering is done through London, which boasts the most sophisticated financial service industry in the world. Regulators run checks on the origins of deposits, but the volume of transactions defeats them. Closing down offshore deposits, or requiring that they be registered in the name of their real owners, would curb this source of criminality.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

She might well have had her eye on the position of Chinese First Lady, but prudence dictated that she discreetly place her money aside abroad, in case of the collapse of Chinese communism. Like many members of the Chinese elite, she made sure that their son, Bo Guagua, received a perfect international education, at Oxford. A British businessman, Neil Heywood, both tutor and financial advisor to the young student, had suggested that the family make some investments in various tax havens, and purchase apartments in the United States and France. The Guoanbu investigation now confirmed that Heywood was rather more than a friend of the Bo family. He was also Gu’s lover. “We need some more details about this Mr Heywood,” Geng Huichang demanded. Thanks to the sheer number of agents Chinese services were able to throw at a case, it took less than a month to complete this investigation.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

For this purpose, wealth taxes should be combined with corporate income taxes, imposed directly on company profits, which are easier to assess and collect. At the very least, wealth taxes would have to be coupled with stronger international cooperation among tax authorities, including an overhaul of the rules for offshore tax havens and a concerted effort to close loopholes. Any wealth tax would also need to be embedded within the constraints imposed by the rule of law and democratic politics and clear constitutional guidelines to assuage concerns that such taxes could be used for expropriating certain groups. On balance, we believe that wealth taxes, if coupled with significant efforts to close tax loopholes and change the accounting industry, could have benefits but are not a major part of the more systemic solutions we are seeking.


pages: 3,002 words: 177,561

Lonely Planet Switzerland by Lonely Planet

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Eyjafjallajökull, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, Higgs boson, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, smart cities, starchitect, trade route

Their son, Prince Hans Adam II, ascended the throne on the prince’s death in 1989. The country’s use of the Swiss franc encourages people to see it as a mere extension of its neighbour, but Liechtenstein has very different foreign policies, having joined the UN and the European Economic Area (EEA) relatively early, in 1990 and 1995 respectively. Long known as a tax haven, the principality banned customers from stashing away money anonymously in 2000. Recently it has implemented tougher reforms in a bid to shrug off its reputation for banking secrecy and recast its image as a legitimate financial centre. Vaduz Pop 5430 / Elev 455m A tiny capital for a tiny country, Vaduz is a postage-stamp-sized city with a postcard-perfect backdrop.


Switzerland by Damien Simonis, Sarah Johnstone, Nicola Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, bank run, car-free, clean water, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, the market place, trade route, young professional

Their son, Prince Hans Adam II, ascended the throne on the prince’s death in 1989. The country’s use of the Swiss franc encourages people to see it as a mere extension of its neighbour, but Liechtenstein has very different foreign policies, having joined the UN and the European Economic Area (EEA) relatively early, in 1990 and 1995 respectively. Known as a tax haven, the principality banned customers from banking money anonymously in 2000, after allegations of money laundering. However, it remains under pressure to introduce more reforms. In 2003, Hans Adam demanded sweeping powers to dismiss the elected government, appoint judges and reject proposed laws. Opponents warned of dictatorship, but the prince threatened to stomp off back to Austria if he didn’t get his way, and the population – possibly worried about what an empty Schloss Vaduz would do to tourism – backed him in a referendum.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

WOODY ALLEN Innovative Marketing was a small and promising start-up that created pioneering software products to address its clients’ needs. The firm’s young founders incorporated their company in Belize because of its favorable tax regimes, a smart move that they modeled on the business practices of well-established tech giants, such as Apple, Google, and HP, each of which has cleverly created subsidiaries in tax havens around the world. To further reduce overhead costs, Innovative Marketing chose to establish its main offices in Kiev, Ukraine, where highly competent technical graduates with advanced degrees in computer science and mathematics were abundant and employees could be hired for a fraction of the salaries offered in Silicon Valley.


pages: 812 words: 205,147

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

., The Memoirs of Khojeh Abdulkurreem, Calcutta, 1788, pp. 147–8. 33Roy, East India Company, p. 165. 34Ibid., pp. 25, 141–2, 165–7. 35C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1988, p. 49. 36Roy, East India Company, p. 23. The problem with seeing Calcutta as a kind of shelter or tax haven for Indian merchants is that these merchants were not only operating in Calcutta, but instead depended on far-flung networks of merchants and suppliers throughout eastern and northern India. Calcutta’s status as a flourishing port, and the Company’s deep pockets, made it a magnet, but it’s also true that the city could only flourish in symbiosis with large sectors of the late Mughal economy.


pages: 601 words: 193,225

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building by Michael Gross

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, it's over 9,000, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, junk bonds, McMansion, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, short selling, strikebreaker, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

According to the Muslim religion, you cannot remarry before three months to be sure you are not pregnant. It seems that he married her before that time. That is unlawful, but not in Jersey.” Not long after he retired, Kar, who’d increased his fortune through investments in silver, set up a trust on Jersey Island, a tax haven in the English Channel. He promised to pay Claudia $500,000 from the trust on his death. Kar “had cash, a lot of land, assets all over the place,” says Aburish. Aboudi thinks his father’s trust totaled $160 million. So Kar could well afford it in 1978, when Rynne told him there was a great apartment available at 740.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

The countries who sent the most migrants to Britain under this scheme between 2008 and 2014 consisted of Russia (433) and China (419), with India (44) fifth in this list. At the same time, those who decided to settle in the UK only paid tax on their income earned within the country rather than that gained abroad, which in some ways made the country a tax haven, with the London super-rich making up 0.01 per cent of the British population, a few thousand people. By the beginning of the twenty-first century London had become a magnet for the world’s billionaires. In some cases, the super-rich did not even settle in the metropolis, simply purchasing properties from abroad as investment, which added to the skyrocketing prices of London property and homes.137 An analysis of the Sunday Times Rich List in 2018 comparing the people who managed to secure an entry in this year with those when this publication first emerged in 1989 points to the fact that in 1989 ‘only five Rich Listers (2.5%) were from ethnic minorities.


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

Although Avis noted that none of its top executives had personally ordered any of the payments, it did take the trouble to add this one, measured sentence in one of its filings with the SEC: “Several members of senior United States management, including the then-two management directors, had knowledge of some of the foregoing payments and ‘off book’ cash funds at various times.” The two management directors at the time were Bud Morrow and Colin Marshall. There was another intriguing matter that drew the attention of the SEC. An Avis subsidiary had written a $470,958 check to a shell company in the tax haven of Jersey, one of the Channel Islands near France. Internal Avis records identified the sum as a consulting fee paid in Italy. Very shortly after making the payment, Avis won a lucrative tax ruling in Italy that added roughly $3.7 million to the company’s bottom line over the course of two otherwise very lean years—a time when Avis urgently needed higher profits to make the company more attractive to potential buyers.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

At the beginning of the century a small measure of democracy, strong national sovereignty and integration into the world market could be combined in the British case at least. In 1914 British capital owned the infrastructure, the banks, the ships, the communications of half the world; it was flush with the incomes of these investments. But in 2000 London was not a centre for the export of capital, but a tax haven attracting it. The United Kingdom was, to an extent not known before, owned by foreigners – the big City institutions, the service companies, the infrastructure operators, the car makers, even the chocolate makers were now owned abroad. Global capitalism was unleashed into the United Kingdom, but British capitalism itself suffered.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Although they are now self-​consciously aligned with the leaders of the northern countries, Irish authorities’ confidence that the country stands on its own feet could prove premature. Ireland’s freakish advantage could well end. The European Commission’s recent conclusion that the Irish government has given the US tech giant Apple unusually favorable tax treatment, along with the stepped-​up international scrutiny of tax havens, will require Ireland to create a new growth model, one that does not rely so heavily on low corporate taxes.170 Ireland is not well prepared to deal with the challenge of that shift. Ireland’s domestic companies do little R&D. The damage from the crisis continues: fiscal austerity forced a decline in public-​education expenditures, and large numbers of young Irish citizens with college degrees left for the United Kingdom, other “Anglo-​Saxon” countries, and the Gulf 432   e u r o t r a g e d y States.171 Without its low-​tax regime, Ireland will find it hard to sustain economic momentum.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Perhaps the Mandelson circle was sending itself up just a little; but it was setting itself up too. Mandelson himself had a strongly developed taste for good living and had borrowed £373,000 to buy a house before the election from Geoffrey Robinson, a cheery MP and supporter of Gordon Brown’s. Robinson had a fortune secreted offshore in a Channel Island tax haven, money from a long business career and also from the bequest of a Belgian widow, happily called Madam Bourgeois. In government he became Paymaster General and in due course Mandelson became Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, the job which meant he was in overall charge of investigations into – among others – one Geoffrey Robinson, the man to whom he was indebted for his West End home.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Seven European principalities, the last survivors of numerous historic mini-states, were too small to exercise an active role in international relations; but each has been well able to exploit its eccentric position. San Marino (founded in the fifth century AD, territory 62 km2, population 23,000) claimed to be Europe’s oldest state. Recognized as independent in 1631, it hugs the slopes of Monte Titano, near Rimini, and is entirely surrounded by Italian territory. It functioned after the war as a tax haven for rich Italians, ruled by a local government dominated alternately by communists and Christian Democrats. The Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein (founded 1719, territory 157 km2, population 27,000) had ceded its foreign policy to Switzerland. In 1980, at $16,440 it had the highest per capita GNP in Europe.

The Isle of Man (territory 518 km2, population 65,000 in 1986) and the Channel Islands (of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey, and Sark—territory 194 km2, population c.134,000 in 1981) were both British dependencies with English connections dating from the Norman Conquest. They were never formally joined to the United Kingdom. Both were wealthy tax havens. The Dame of Sark was still contesting her prerogatives with Westminster in the 1960s. In the 1990s the ‘parliament’ of the Isle of Man was courting a showdown by failing to follow England’s example in legalizing private homosexual acts between consenting adults. Gibraltar was the only British dependency outside the British Isles to join the EC.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Adair Turner, director general of the CBI, marvelled that the new government was ‘so craven’ in its dealings with big business. Meanwhile, those within New Labour circles who did have some money were keen to hold on to it; another story that broke in November 1997 concerned Geoffrey Robinson, the paymaster general, and the millions of pounds he kept in a trust in an offshore tax haven. Most notable in retrospect, though, was the way that the Ecclestone affair suggested New Labour’s tendency to regard falsehood as a weapon of first resort. A cavalier approach to fact was evident elsewhere, often in the most trivial of stories. There was Blair’s claim, for example, to have watched Jackie Milburn playing for Newcastle.


pages: 993 words: 318,161

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

That whole video was in the can, ready to go, before the exploit was launched.” “But he changed his mind.” “By degrees.” “What?” “El changed his mind by degrees, over a period of weeks. He was holed up in Z-A to avoid any possible issues around extradition.” As Corvallis knew, Z-A was Zelrijk-Aalberg, a Flemish nano-state and tax haven where El had been spending most of his time the last few years. “So there was a degree of insulation from legal consequences—but even so he was disconcerted by how effective it had been. By the fact that people died.” “I can see how that would give you pause,” Corvallis said, a bit sarcastically.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

It wasn't an original structure, but as a way of getting control of Lazard with other people's money while at the same time getting rid of Michel, it was nothing short of brilliant. More clever still was Bruce's decision to incorporate Lazard Ltd. in Hamilton, Bermuda, a well-known and controversial tax haven for American companies. Bruce is nothing if not creative when it comes to avoiding taxes. Lazard became the first large Wall Street investment bank to incorporate there, after first considering and then rejecting both Luxembourg and Delaware. Since the United States taxes corporations (and individuals) on their worldwide income, regardless of where it is earned, by incorporating in Bermuda, not only would Lazard not have to pay taxes there (there are no income or capital gains taxes on the island), but also its income from outside the States would not be subject to U.S. taxes.


pages: 1,280 words: 384,105

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

Mary and the kids went with him.” “Why?” “Why do any of them go? War in Iraq, crap public transport, psycho Bush threatening North Korea, the congestion charge, council tax. The real world, in other words, that’s what he’s running away from. He thinks he’s going to be living in some kind of tropical tax haven with fairies doing all the hard work, the dumb shit.” “I’m sorry. What did your mum say? She must be devastated.” Abbey growled, and took another slug. “She says she’s glad he’s gone; that he and the grandkids deserve a fresh start somewhere nice. Can you believe that? Selfish cow, she’s gone senile if you ask me.


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Medium-term note (MTN) Debt with a typical maturity of 1 to 10 years offered regularly by a company using the same procedure as commercial paper. Merger (1) Acquisition in which all assets and liabilities are absorbed by the buyer (cf. exchange of assets, exchange of stock); (2) more generally, any combination of two companies. MIP (Monthly income preferred security) Preferred stock issued by a subsidiary located in a tax haven. The subsidiary relends the money to the parent. Mismatch bond Floating-rate note whose interest rate is reset at more frequent intervals than the rollover period (e.g., a note whose payments are set quarterly on the basis of the one-year interest rate). Modified accelerated cost recovery system (MACRS) Schedule of depreciation deductions allowed for tax purposes.