Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (A Norton Short)

Book excerpt: An eye-opening account of offshore finance: a secretive system making the rich richer while corroding democracy, capitalism, and the environment. How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? From playboy billionaires avoiding taxes on private islands to Russian oligarchs sailing away from sanctions on their superyachts, the ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world’s ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way. In Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, sociologist Brooke Harrington reveals how this system works, as well as how it degrades democracy, the economy, and the public goods on which we all depend. Harrington spent eight years infiltrating this secretive world by training as a wealth manager, traveling from glossy European and North American capitals to developing countries in South America and Africa, to islands in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean, and South Pacific regions. Through interviews with dozens of wealth managers in nineteen countries, Harrington uncovered how this global network of offshore financial centers arose from the remnants of colonialism and has created a new, hidden imperial class This engrossing deep dive reveals what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world—not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires, who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.