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by heterogenic
4448 days ago
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I find this a bit implausible... "How much money" exists in the world is not a terribly difficult number to ballpark. When someone stashes money offshore it doesn't disappear, it just becomes unidentifiable. It still goes into TBills, bonds, equity, etc; and that we can measure. And at a more granular level, the offshore banks in question need to state and verify their assets in order to issue loans, and without loans they can't generate interest. We may not know who it belongs to, but we know it's there. There's a lot of tax evasion out there. A _lot_. But it's easy enough to do through legal loopholes that few jump through these kinds of hoops. |
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Now I can't vouch 100% for its validity but he makes some very interesting points.
Most notably: the biggest shelter countries --- those that allow masking of ownership but also freely invest in other investment vehicles based in countries with their own rules that make it easier to mask the source of investments.
It's a many-layered onion: The paper suggests that - Switzerland is the biggest location for accounts that purchase these investment vehicles. - Luxembourg and Caymen Islands are the biggest centers for these investment vehicle funds: e.g. hedge funds and mutual funds which sell their equities to the Swiss-based money.
Most interestingly: If you ask Switzerland where the money in their accounts comes from, they of course will not tell you. HOWEVER they do publish aggregate stats on a per-country-of-origin basis.
Guess which countries are the source of most of the Swiss tax haven investments? - Panama and others.
Are Panamanians the new global super-rich? Of course not. It's another layer in the onion, and it makes it almost impossible to figure out where the source money is. And Panama doesn't publish anything about its source money.
One can intuit, however, that the only folks who have something to gain from masking through so many layers are tax evaders. If these were Saudis or others, why would they care?
The scale of the wealth is difficult to measure since it's presumably inflated by going through these layers each with their own banking rules of fractional reserves (I assume).
But what we're really talking about here is the big holders of equities, mutual funds, hedge funds, and bond wealth that we traditionally see as "owned by developing world entities". But the speculation is that actually a far larger portion is indeed owned by western interests, masking themselves.