Nicholas Shaxson

Breathtaking!

„Offshore prevents effective oversight of financial markets, makes crises more likely and enables rich insiders to shift all the risks and the costs of bailouts onto the working majority and away from the investing minority. The efficiency that boosters of the offshore system claim for themselves is bogus. Capital no longer flows to where it gets the best return, but to where it can secure the best tax subsidies, the regulations it does not like. None of these attractions has anything to do with allocating capital more efficiently.“ (page 70)

“Many people supposed that by eliminating double taxation and creating nearly frictionless conduits for capital, the offshore system was promoting global economic efficiency. In reality the system was rarely adding value, but instead redistributing wealth upwards and risks downwards, and creating a new global hothouse for crime. US crime-fighting lawyer John Moscow summarized the problem. 'Money is power, and we are transferring this power to corporate bank accounts run by people who are in the purest sense of the word unaccountable and therefore irresponsible.'” (page 148)

“Yet behind this lay an extraordinary fact. While the City's 9,000-odd human residents had one vote each, business in the City could vote too, with 23,000 votes between them. The corporations could easily outvote the human beings. (…) Thus Goldman Sachs, the Bank of China, Moscow Narodny Bank and KPMG have been voting in British elections.” (page 265)

Offshore Banking and Tax Havens Have Become Heart of Global Economy
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/15/offshore_banking_and_tax_havens_have

In this RSA Animate, renowned academic David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0

A Watson Institute video on the global trend toward Austerity budgets featuring Mark Blyth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmsjGys-VqA

Inequality, Leverage and Crises:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2010/wp10268.pdf

The Egyptian Tinderbox: How Banks and Investors Are Starving the Third World:
http://www.truth-out.org/the-egyptian-tinderbox-how-banks-and-investors-are-star...

This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U… (mehr)