Uncovering the secret offshore accounts of the global elite | Hacker News Reader

Uncovering the secret offshore accounts of the global elite

newyorker.com

119 pointschalst47 comments

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> one report had suggested that the amount of money held in trusts in South Dakota had grown from two billion dollars in 2007 to three hundred and sixty billion dollars today.

Wow. South Dakota, "offshore" money haven.

Yeah, its almost as if money like (or as) information routes around damage.

* Gilmore puts it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."*

https://web.archive.org/web/20210408023213/https://kirste.us...

Uncovering elites... in the New Yorker? Ya I'm going to go out on a limb and say nothing will come of this but more rules for the working class and small business.

Is it true that selected group of people can buy shares in Fed?

The Fed is quasi-private so yes you can

Not at all.

Here's a quote from the Kansas City Fed webpage [1]

  Who owns the Federal Reserve?
  The Federal Reserve System fulfills its public mission as an independent entity within government. It is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution.

[1] https://www.kansascityfed.org/about-us/frequently-asked-ques...

They are owned by it's member banks.

The member banks are most certainly for-profit.

Those member banks are in turn owned through a web of funds and trusts by individuals.

Do you really think these institutions exists for the good of the people? They exist to control the people by controlling the availability of credit, which is the main driver of the artificial boom-bust economic cycle.

This is a fairly widespread misconception. It needs to be dispelled.

The member banks do formally own "stock" in the Federal Reserve, but this stock does not confer any ownership rights.

From Wikipedia [1]

  The amount of stock a member bank must own is equal to 3% of its combined capital and surplus. However, holding stock in a Federal Reserve bank is not like owning stock in a publicly traded company. These stocks cannot be sold or traded, and member banks do not control the Federal Reserve Bank as a result of owning this stock.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve#Member_banks

Voting rights. Influence. Nothing more is even required. The governance by committee results in de-facto control by the biggest stake-holders -- the biggest banks, who are controlled by their private share-holders. It's just a smoke-screen. Also those are not very reliable sources on this topic. Wikipedia is run by an e-beggar and edited by seo farm workers. For a good comparable to the PR website referenced why don't we ask the CCP if they are democratic and government for their people? Let's check their own website?

> Voting rights.

Citation needed. Or rather, it's not needed. The Federal Reserve Board has 7 members, all nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, with a term of 14 years [1]. All the decisions of the Federal Reserve Board are taken by a vote of these members only. The record of the votes is public, and available at [2].

> Influence.

This is quite an unfalsifiable statement, isn't it? I claim that the Knights Templars have lots of influence with the Fed, can you refute that? In any case, influence has nothing to do with legal ownership, which was the thing we were arguing about. My first quotation was straight from the Kansas City Fed webpage, and states clearly that the Fed is not owned by anybody. The legal act behind the Fed is the Federal Reserve Act, which you can peruse at your leisure [3]. It will just confirm that. Or is that not reliable? Is the Constitution reliable, or maybe it's on par with the publications of the CCP?

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/defaul...

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/boardvotes.htm

[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/fract.htm

I find the video associated with Ron Paul's tweet to be very informational on this subject.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ronpaul/status/106601525488535552...

The Federal Reserve isn't "federal" and it has no "reserves."

Is it a public institution? No... Is it private? No again... Is it Constitutional? Absolutely not!...

I stopped watching the video after the guest stated that the Fed makes “counterfeit money”. This is deep into lala land.

Maybe he has issues with debt-to-GDP ratio, federal debt interest payments, bubble in derivatives or whatever. I'm sure there are many valid points of criticism and maybe the comparison “counterfeit money” is not a statement too far from reality. Why FED has not been audited is one thing to think about.

The Fed is audited [1]. I am personally not a fan of the Fed manipulating the money supply via the FOMC, in particular I consider them to be the main culprit in the 2008 crisis. But it's one thing to disagree with some of the Fed's actions, another to engage in delusions that the Fed is unconsitutitional or it issues "counterfeit" money. The Fed was created by an Act of the Congress. It cannot be any more legal than that. Asking the question "Who owns the Fed" is as meaningless as asking "Who owns the CDC".

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12784.htm

I can't take your quotation seriously because, obviously FED "knows about the auditing issue", and there is a conflict of interest. The Fed was created by an Act of the Congress and a collusion. I believe Ron Paul thinks that the FED is engaging in actions that the congress has not given permission to do. Is that argument about FED creating money (purchasing assets) and not having permission by congress to do so? Is it stated somewhere that there are rights to "mint coin" and it is interpreted by the issuer in a way that "allows to add zeroes in a computer"? ...if you understand what I mean.

a lot of these journalists have been purchased by the elites and have their own axes to grind, so unless the amateur folks are given a framework to ferret out such information, not much will come out of this.

> a lot of these journalists have been purchased by the elites

Care to name one? I'd be very surprised if you can find something on Michael Hudson:

https://www.icij.org/journalists/michael-hudson/

> not much will come out of this

Today I read that President Sebastián Piñera of Chile has been impeached following the ICIJ's revelation of details of a controversial mining deal.

Your comment reads like cheap cynicism.

Do you have a source for that claim? Is anything in the article factually incorrect?

It's been evident for decades that people do this, so it's safe to say that the only reason they don't prosecute this is that they choose not to.

The people that would prosecute and judge are also part of the scheme. Accountability is just something to teach the poor kids in public schools--who aren't the offspring of the corrupt ruling class--so they behave. Fortunately the ruling class knows to keep us anesthetized and distracted just enough to prevent real change and protect themselves.

Panem et circenses

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Brilliant. Funnysad that this still works nearly two thousand years later.

class provocations are misplaced -- the business process cuts people out every day, its not about where you went to school. I object to this class-based commentary because it is a giant distraction from applying solutions

Disregarding the real and legitimate effect of class and background is just as bad as fixating on it too much.

I think the idea of class as the parent used it is less upper vs middle class (in the sense of folks who can afford Yale vs folks who can't afford college), but rather the capital class vs the working class.

Do you have a boss? You are a worker, and even if you are making $500k a year you have more in common with other workers than you do with folks who make their money from having money.

Why can I not criticize the US class system and apply solutions?

There are plenty of problems to go around, and to assume for me that my statement as an either/or fallacy is disingenuous.

However, given my experience of 50+ years on earth, or just even 5 years of looking at who gets killed for selling a loose cigarette, or who gets shot for complying with a police stop, and who gets to walk for raping an unconscious woman, and who gets millions of taxpayer dollars in PACs for inciting a coup, I think the news speaks for itself about class vs. justice in the US. In this context, it appears you are obfuscating to protect the corrupt.

I get the feeling that this is a big nothing burger to the average citizen. They don't care. However, the light shining on this and the subsequent legal action may spur change in spite of voter apathy.

This has uncovered the fact that war criminals are buying houses and apartments in various communities around the US. These communities could pass their own ordinances around real estate ownership to stop this.

I disagree. They do care. They just feel powerless to do anything about it. People across the world are devoting a full third of their waking lives to create wealth for those who spend their time and resources devising ways to maintain their positions atop the system.

If one does care but do nothing then he/she doesn't really care. I actually think people are getting used to it bit refuses to admit.

BTW I don't blame anyone. I myself feel powerless and know I don't care enough to make real actions.

> If one does care but do nothing then he/she doesn't really care. I actually think people are getting used to it bit refuses to admit.

That makes no sense. "Getting used to it" is a coping mechanism for powerlessness. Of course people care, but they also care about living out the rest of their lives and not sacrificing themselves to a thankless hopeless political cause with unclear solutions.

Is there something you'd suggest they do? If someone feels powerless and cares deeply, but has no actions available to them it feels pretty bad to say, "they don't really care."

Like, what are the options? Running for office themselves on a third party ticket? I can't think of anything that isn't a massive investment of time, money, and energy.

Yes, they could get involved with organizations like the DSA and try to grow mutual aid networks and voting blocks. They could get involved with unions and push for more collective power. But those are also big time commitments.

> People across the world are devoting a full third of their waking lives to create wealth for those

I don’t know where you are living, but it is trivially obvious that the vast majority of my taxes are NOT going to some elite. They couldn’t hide one tenth of your figure without it being obvious - what they do skim is publically known.

In New Zealand the vast majority of taxes gets spent on people working for the government and welfare payments to individuals (eg unemployment & pension).

This is personally verifiable: I interact with teachers, nurses, retirees, welfare recipients. I see how much money gets spent on large projects, and I see many of the recipients of those funds. I charge government departments for my software. I can estimate the total tax base and I can estimate the total costs.

I can read the government accounts, and I can do my own audit analysis estimates of parts of it. I can meet my members of parliament or local politicians.

Furthermore: talking about time like that is a fallacy. You belong to an economy and taxes are more like an accounting entry. A teacher might have 100% of their working hours working for the government, while a Facebook employee works zero hours for the government.

If you are from the US, your income comes from your economy, not your work as an individual. The government takes a cut, and most people in the world would love to pay the taxes so that they could earn the average US wage. Fuck all people can move between countries and “earn” the same amount - their income depends on the economy they belong to. If you are from the US, then you are the corrupt elite recipient of the taxes of the world poor. Your earnings come indirectly from Google, from unfair patent and copyright systems, from blowing up Afghanis. I am being facetious, but there is some underlying truth to why US citizens have a median income far higher than most others in the world.

Forget taxes. The wealthy derive their wealth from capital - ownership of means of making more money.

Their involvement with the tax system is chiefly to use their influence to prevent their wealth from being taxed as much as possible - not to profit from it. (Whenever possible, they will seek public investment into their own private projects, but that's not the same as surreptitously siphoning off tax money for their own coffers.)

Here’s a list of the richest people in the world: https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

Notably absent from the list is Vladmir Putin and the entire House of Saud, which calls into question whether the list contains the actually richest people in the world.

Man its high time we move banks into space. The global elite should have an option to park all their cash there or maybe shoot it into the sun. That way loss aversion and privacy can be handled better.

It takes a surprizing amount of energy to reach the sun, because we are carrying so much momentum.

Considering how the US government has spent its trillions in the last few decades, keeping money offshore might actually be an ethical move. If buying products from a company that exploits workers in X country is unethical, why are taxes used to fund wars any different?

It's good that the ICIJ is getting this information out there, I just wish they'd stop removing prominent Americans from what they publish.

Would you elaborate? For Americans, this is obviously as important if not more important!

They are asking them to include the names of American people in the published list.

They have named some prominent Americans. If they are actively censoring them no one has stated that.

People speculate that Americans weren’t large customers of the firms that leaked because a) US tax regime provides less benefit and b) Americans don’t need to go offshore because we have states inshore that provide similar benefits.

> I just wish they'd stop removing prominent Americans from what they publish.

What is the point of making incendiary comments like this but then not providing any evidence to back them up?

Which prominent Americans are ICIJ removing, and from which publications of theirs? And how do you know this? These are all basic things you need to preemptively provide evidence of if you're going to make a claim like this.

Unfortunately the ones who could do something about that are the ones who do the same shit

That's not quite right, we significantly outnumber them.

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