The Ugly Face of Globalization

August 7, 2012 10:52 PM

How Filthy Rich Rootless Cosmopolitans Use International Tax Havens to Avoid Paying Their Debts to Their Own Societes "A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network. James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer. He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals... The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies."
posted by bookman117 (6 comments total)

Articles about how unfair everything is are great and all but is there a solution or are we just riling up the proletariat again?

A solution that stands a reasonable possibility of being implemented would be preferred. I like a good revolution as much as the next person but it seems unlikely to happen.
posted by fireoyster at 11:00 PM on August 7, 2012

This is interesting, but what's up with the use of the term "Rootless Cosmopolitan"? That's a Stalin-era euphemism for "Jew", and its use isn't really made more justified by putting "Filthy" in front of it.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:01 PM on August 7, 2012 [1 favorite]

Horrible editorializing in post.
posted by benito.strauss at 11:02 PM on August 7, 2012

is there a solution or are we just riling up the proletariat again?

Rile up the proletariat enough and a solution may emerge.
posted by hippybear at 11:02 PM on August 7, 2012 [3 favorites]

Horrible editorializing in post.

There's no editorializing going on. It's a quote of the opening paragraphs of the article contained in the first link of the FPP.
posted by hippybear at 11:04 PM on August 7, 2012

I was referring to "How Filthy Rich Rootless Cosmopolitans Use International Tax Havens to Avoid Paying Their Debts to Their Own Societes". Maybe I've got so much javascript turned off that it's not showing up for me.
posted by benito.strauss at 11:07 PM on August 7, 2012