TREASURE ISLANDS - a review by Peter Preston, in The Guardian
The United States had a generous Marshall Plan [after WW II] that burrowed its influence deep into the policy-making and recovering bourses of old, battered Europe. The City of London, seeing its imperial glories fade, used the leftover connections of empire to construct a web of influence and cash around the globe (with the Bank of England playing head spider). The Swiss, sitting pretty, had lessons of neutrality, secrecy and cupidity to impart to a wider audience. Enter bright sparks who might have invented spaceships or life-saving drugs, but in fact invented the eurodollar market – a continent of opportunity without actual territory or policing, because it existed somewhere over there, somewhere offshore. And, of course, enter the tax havens that helped make the whole edifice possible: enter anywhere where transparency lay covered in mists and democracy was up for sale to the highest bidder: enter the havens of opportunity.
... Simply, the glum fact that the havens of globalisation serve the rich and the west, not the poor and the south, so that leaders signing up for change must also destroy the structures that made them, and paid for their election.
Maybe, straying into the jargon of the investigative reporter, Shaxson makes the conspiracy seem too vast and all-encompassing. Many of the outrages he broods over – say, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International debacle – are so long gone that they lack immediate force. Too many of his witnesses, from Grand Cayman to St Peter Port, are either anonymous or whistleblowers stuck in a shrill, single groove. Really, we're talking about a universal way of business life here, about a system so entrenched, so formidable in the lobbying, so familiar in its assumptions, that even 2008 can't blast it away.
... What to do? Alas, Treasure Islands isn't much help here. Prioritise "leadership and unilateral action"? Dream on . . . "Confront the British spider's web"? "Rethink corporate responsibility"? Somehow you can only see pot-holes along this rutted rhetorical road. Somehow you finish reading Shaxson much more depressed than heretofore.
-- Jon O
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