Who’s more rich and powerful

 

Oliver Bullough argue in his latest book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World  and How To Take It Back, that the current financial system is broken and is actively damaging society, corruption and ideptocracy is not a symptom of a bust society but is a root cause. Oliver Bullough a former foreign correspondent whose experiences in corrupt corners of the world inform his work, and also runs tours of London where visitors can see the penthouses of despots’ daughters or mansions owned Oilgarchs.

 

Moneyland describes the borderless world with a pic and mix of right, loopholes and laws, where inhabitants can choose “Maltese passports, English passports, American privacy, Panamanian in shell companies, jersey trusts, Liechtenstein foundations.”

Past Too Big To Fail, mis-selling scandals and $150bn of bank fines are no longer so controversial. During the time the financial sector has moved from creation of wealth to extracting it to the determent of the society.

Bullough goes to the rundown, technically free, hospital in Ukraine where a mother must pay a bribe in order for her child to be treated but where the chief Oncologist owns a $2.5m home. He shows on the doorstep of the Harley Street townhouse that is home to a company that creates companies by the thousand. He also meets the bureaucratic resistance in St Kitts he turns on a 84-year –old politician-turned garage mechanic to explain citizenship for sale.

He acknowledges the demise of the post second world war Bretton Woods International system of monetary and exchange rate management in the early 1970s as the birth of financialisation and the role of the City of London as key to that demise after creation of the offshore industry.

In the era  of gangster,oligarchs, murdered journalists and outgunned tax inspectors, Trump and Putin, Bullough quotes the economist James Henry who reckoned in 2010 that the global super-rich were parking as much as $32tn in offshore tax havens, saying “ We are up against one of society’s most well trenched interest groups, after all, there is no interest group more rich and powerful than the rich and powerful”.

 

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule The World and How to Take it Back by Oliver Bullough Profile £20, 304 pages