Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Just take Apple as one example.
Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax.
This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now.
From what I recall Google started this scam and it is still the master of avoiding tax and while the populous is happy to vote in governments that turn a blind eye to this practice, it will remain a very lucrative endeavour.
It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it.
We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing.
Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.
This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades.
As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia:
https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-...
If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individual they would be facing decades in prison.
These businesses are actively stealing the citizens from their essential services.
The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.
Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.
Personally I believe that healthy is when there is a power balance between democratically controlled government and privately owned business. They should be about equal in power. In many western countries, especially the US, the power balance has shifted completely toward business. Business can dictate law and make governments compete with one another for their money.
This is obviously the wrong way around, it undermines democracy (aka the people) and benefits business owners (aka the rich). Business should compete with another, governments should set rules for their markets. If a country votes for high taxes and generous public services, this should be priced in by business, not undermined and circumvented.
I'm not hearing anything remotely bad in this sentence.
The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.
1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work.
2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do)
A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.
https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/de... https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/internation...
This is purely about wealth mobility for people with >$50m net worth.
People who got it through corruption at best and genocide at worst (literal genocide in a case I know in NY). The average Chinese or Russian citizen will never have the chance to move their money abroad because they have none, they will never have the chance to move themselves because legal immigration is expensive.
Britain and some other Western nations had capital controls until around the 1980s, without using them to oppress people. The millions who fled revolutionary China, without their capital, seeded Hong Kong and Taiwan with the huge population growth that made them what they are today.
e.g. https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...
Giving the Nazi example of an oppressive regime being oppressive doesn't change that - they were oppressive via nearly all the other tools of free democracies too. Property seizures and taking away all freedom of movement was far more symptomatic of being oppressive. OP's China example is a place that is oppressive in many ways, but far from being one of the main means of oppression, capital control has been liberalised hugely in recent years. Freedom of movement, to emigrate, to demonstrate, etc on the other hand...
The idea that this cosmopolitanism of the elites is something that the average person even cares about is a fiction peddled to maintain the status quo. If you look at the rise of populists around the globe, are they nationalists or are they hyper-libertarians who want to give John Doe the ability to move to Swasiland?
The productive 'dystopia' you're talking about isn't China, it's West Germany in 1960-1970. As the article points out, the world under Bretton Woods had strict capital controls, was everyone in the Western world living in a dystopia? Obviously not. And by the way, the average middle class person in China these days isn't exactly living under dystopic conditions either.
I absolutely don't see how taking control away from elites, restoring capital controls and national autonomy and reigning in global capital is dystopic. It was the primary development model for any country on the planet whose general population, and not just elites, are prosperous.
When your government is willing to torture and kill you in order to get their way, and they are willing to do it on foreign soil, it doesn't seem so easy, or safe.
It’s a depressing read.
If you're a Jew who knows his or her history, you probably know the answer to this question already. Jews frequently get scapegoated by populists (and others) when people are targeting "stateless money changers" regardless of the fact that most of the key players mentioned here are English, Russian, and Chinese.
Do it, or Chinese will do it for us.
I disagree, they have vastly more capital than the 99% of earners below them. Unless you're comparing those 1%ers to someone like Zuckerberg specifically, there's really no way to square this statement.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings threshold to be in the top 1% of earners in 2017 was $718K.[0] That's a pretty incredible amount of annual capital for an individual. Sure, it's not enough to start a hedge fund, but even after taxes, you're able to seriously invest in things like real estate, which fewer Americans are able to do.
0: https://www.epi.org/blog/top-1-0-percent-reaches-highest-wag...
> There’s so much ease to global movement of capital they just move it around so they pay - no taxes - have no accounts with their name on it - launder all their money legally (if need be) - buy up property and invest without any interest in any country in particular.
>top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes
Radiolab (I think?) had an episode on this.
Even the rich are jealous of their "1%".
To make the top 1% in terms of income, yes, it's $32k/year but to make the top 1% in terms of wealth you would need $770k in net worth, well beyond most Americans, even with assets such as an iPhone and a Starbucks coffee.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
Not at all - from the comment I was replying to “Vast majority of top 1% don't even have much capital to speak of.”
But my wider point being that it is just used to mean “anyone slightly wealthier than me”.
https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/[0]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...
These people (top 1% by capital) are as far from archetypal "sharks of capitalism" as it gets.
Indeed. Someone who bought their house in the 70s or 80s and has now paid off their mortgage and also been contributing to a pension fund for a 40-year working life could easily retire with a “net worth” of $770k. It would be a stretch to count them as “rich”.
> A class of enablers has arisen to help Moneylanders perform parts two and three of what Bullough describes as their eternal cycle: “steal-hide-spend”. London overflows with lawyers, bankers, accountants, estate agents, public relations advisers, luxury-goods sellers, restaurateurs and art dealers who make their living servicing criminals. They see themselves as neutral, highly skilled professionals who (mostly, anyway) work within the law.
It has simply got easier and in fact the group of people who can attempt it, though tiny, has grown much larger.
Either you have wealthy individuals do it, or you have the government do it. But someone has to pool a lot of resources in one place and start moving them around, if we want things like free med school to exist.
Maybe it's better if the government does it; in theory it leads to better outcomes because the government has better incentives to make good decisions with their wealth-movement power, outweighing the inefficiencies of economic centralization by ensuring that people's basic needs are met across the population. This is what a lot of leftists and liberals will argue.
Meanwhile conservatives, libertarians, etc. will point to government track records in actually implementing programs well, engaging in corruption, designing good policy, and becoming extensions of corporate interests. Not to mention generalized waste due to mismatch between "incentives to start projects" and "incentives not to spend money".
I.e. I met a software guy from Sachs who told me about what he did there. Essentially he built automated software to flag “suspicious transactions”. So ie if 200 million came in from he Faroe Islands the software would flag it as “possibly” an unlawful transfer. It made sure the books were “kosher”.
So I asked him
Me: oh ok, so then the software blocked those transactions?
Him: no.
Me: Well did it flag them so they would investigate it?
Him: no.
Me: What did it do then?
Him: It just flagged them.
Me: just flagged them? ... so what did it do? What was it for?
Him: It was designed so when the Sachs managing team are called to court they can say “oh yeah we’re very sorry our software flagged that as a suspicious activity. We’re really sorry, won’t happen again”. And then they’ll get a 200 million fine on a 3 billion operation. By law they don’t have to do anything else, so they don’t.
It's the one single thing that makes me most pro-EU. I don't see how we can fight tax evasion on a country-by-country level. But a economic and geographical bloc as big as the EU has enough clout to have real enforcement power.
The EU gave us the double-Irish and the Dutch-sandwich and other tax evasion schemes used by large corporations. They want the exact opposite of “real enforcement power”.
And if I’m not mistaken part of the reason why it went away was the EU kept giving them advice to stop it.
Perhaps rhetoric or ideology given that it is dripping with antisemitic dogwhistles taken at face value. Most of those are essentially ancient bullying charging them with being disloyal, rootless, and exploitative after repeatably persecuting them, displacing them and forcing them into a scapegoated "dirty work" that was religiously allowee so they stood to inherit the money after their death. Looting like that has occured through time immemorial - from the occupation of Viking, literal stealing of goods and the very literal colonialism of the East India Company and Leopold.
Once again it ammounts to absurd scapegoating - if they actually wanted to hold the kleptocrats accountable they would hold them accountable! Their fortunes aren't going to do them much good when they are isolated from them in prison or death row.
It is the blind hierarchical normism of enforcement double standard that is the true root. Ousted dictators aren't responsible for travesties and can retire quietly while enslaved hostages are guilty of materially supporting terrorists.
Also - they shouldn't be a _domestic_ investment vehicle either.
- we have people who live in subpar conditions
- let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need
- actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony?
- within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto
- oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garbage on the floors. So we sell these houses at discount.
- goto step 1
An absolutely fantastic country.
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-l...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/nyregion/how-new-york-cit...
First, there are buses going to Long Island beaches (Jones Beach, specifically).
Second, a place becomes a ghetto not because there's no nice park nearby. A district becomes a ghetto because people who live there deface the walls and throw garbage on the streets.
I have to wonder, does anyone, yourself included, want projects in their neighborhood? And more importantly, is there evil dirt in 'bad' neighborhoods that makes housing projects become high-crime ghettos, and if we just build them in middle-class neighborhoods with good dirt instead, everyone's going to behave and make it a nice place to live?
I can tell you, living in an extremely liberal, formerly low-crime small city that in the past decade decided to "put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods" and even offered section 8 vouchers to random people from a big city hundreds of miles away to move in, it's been a catastrophe. Spreading crime and dysfunction around isn't really better than quarantining it.
I'm sure there has been research done on this, I will try to find some references.
-Ah, the federal government pushed/incentivized us to give mortgages to people who have poor odds of paying them back
-Economy or housing market downturns a bit
-A bunch of people can't pay their mortgages
-Major recession