Reddit reviews Treasure Islands: Dirty Money, Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole Your Cash

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Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson. It shows the british are still the best in town (city of london has been in the game longer than anybody...) even though there's plenty of competition out there. After reading that then this article merely states the obvious.

It's a pretty interesting place in a crazy way. Because it's been around for about 1000 years, the laws they have haven't changed (because of it's independence) and so there's odd quirks such as the laws it has - which noone really knows who writes them or why - and voting for the mayor also is kinda odd as votes are issued on the amount of property you own, so banks with sky scrapers obviously get a huge influence. Source

I can't remember where I saw it (looking for the wiki article now) but there's also meant to be a couple of bank accounts which have existed for several hundred years, and thus no-one has any idea how much money they actually have, though it's likely to be huge amounts. There's this article though I'm fairly sure there's more than one account, or at least this isn't the one I saw originally.

City of London Corporation reveals its secret £1.3bn bank account

I think there would be a great amount of benefit to be found in a group of leftists pushing to really create a movement to bring to the fore the crushing realities of global liberal finance, the city of London's role in this and the tax avoidance commonwealth.

Because when you perceive what is going on with some clarity the picture is truly staggering.

As a starting point for us interested folk, I'd recommend

Western Media’s Narrow, Colonial Definition of "Corruption" - Citations Needed podcast.

Noam Chomsky: "Free Markets?" - Chomsky on Free Markets and Liberal capital.

The City: London and the Global Power of Finance - The City of London Corporation.

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson

And then ask yourself to name a Commonwealth territory.

The Virgin Islands? Tax haven.

The Isle of Man? Tax haven.

Jersey? Tax haven.

Guernsey? Tax haven

The Cayman Islands? uhggg I dunno chief, they a tax haven?

>"But we can't impose our tax laws there! It's an independent territory!"

>"But of course, we can transfer cash over there! To impede liberal cash flows would be to impede the free market and cut them out of our liberal banking institutions"

The wealth transfers from the global North (Western world) to the global south via charity and government aid is nearly $2 trillion a year.

The global wealth transfers from the global South to the global North via liberal finance as proscribed under neoliberalism and facilitated by institutions such as the world bank and IMF are over $5 trillion a year.


The majority of this is through the city of London Corporation.

We as a nation are histories greatest thieves, and the saddest fucking fact is those who benefit from this, won't even allow us to fund the NHS.

It is beyond a travesty, if this was known by every citizen in the country right now, I fully believe the government would be out on the streets by this time tomorrow.

if you'd like to point your economic eye(s) toward Delaware, you'll see it hosts 60% of the fortune 500 and 882,000 "active business entities" (according to this book). it's a rather good book at that, i recommend reading it if you want to know why to revolt against the government.

Panama Papers among other investigations into tax avoidance and evasion, yes.

Maybe, but everything I've read suggests that once the money is safely offshore the best outcome is that it gets taxed heavily when it gets repatriated.

As an example, Apple have trillions currently sat in Bermuda hoping that Trump will change the tax laws.

If the UK was serious about addressing the problem there are two obvious and important measures they could take.

The first would be to tackle the huge British-controlled network of offshore territories ranging from the City itself, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey etc etc and all the way to BVI, Cayman etc etc.

There is an excellent book called Treasure Islands which explains this complex web and the role it plays in global tax avoidance.

The second would be to adopt transparency laws, like those already used in some Scandanavian countries where individuals tax returns are published publicly. It was those laws which helped journalists determine that tax evasion is actually extremely concentrated to the top 0.01% of households. This is an interesting read on this investigation.

Of course neither of these will be adopted as, far from being a force against tax evasion, the UK represents one of the most powerful enablers of it and you only need to take a quick walk around Mayfair and hear the conversations to appreciate why.