Verso Books Dirty Secrets : How Tax Havens Destroy The Economy

The Panama Papers demonstrated that the superrich hide their wealth from the rest of us.Dirty Secrets shows that this was not by accident, but by design.It was the result of a powerful alliance of the wealthy, their advisers and the state that has undermined all attempts to solve the tax haven problem. This is because tax havens are the unacknowledged heart of globalized capitalism.Their purpose is to provide freedom from regulation.The exponents say this makes markets work and so we all gain.But this argument has now failed. Furthermore democracy itself is being threatened by the political fallout from the mistrust this regime has created. The result is that tax havens are now a threat to the very system that supposedly spawned it.Dirty Secrets is the most revelatory examination of the crisis by a leading expert, but also offers solutions on how governments can regulate havens and what the world might look like without them.