4 Quotes by Nicholas Shaxson

So Eurodollars were in one sense dollars like any other, but in another sense they were different because they had escaped into a market outside government control, where they could behave freely. It’s a bit like taking someone from their family home in the suburbs to a wild part of town and offering them whisky and cocaine. They are the same person but also different – more fun but also more irresponsible.

...offshore is, almost by definition, the equivalent of the smoke-filled room, where business always gets done outside of, and indeed in opposition to, the democratic process. They operate according to the Golden Rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules.

One is that the offshore system is perhaps the strongest determinant of how political and economic power works in this world. It helps rich people, companies and countries stay on top, for no good economic or political reason. It’s the battleground of the rich versus the poor, you versus the corporations, the havens against the democracies – and in each battle, unless you’re very rich, you are losing.

Just as European nobles used to consolidate their unaccountable powers in castles, to better subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so financial capital has coalesced in these fortified nodes of unaccountable political and economic power, capturing local politics and turning these jurisdictions into fast and flexible private law-making machines, defended against outside interference and protected by establishment consensus and the suppression of dissent.