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posted by CoolHand on Monday October 15 2018, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-rich-getting-richer dept.

Understanding 'Moneyland' — the offshore world of the super-rich

Many of the world's problems — from declining public services to corruption — can be explained in two words: offshore wealth. That's according to investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, who is working to unravel the intricate global web of money and power. To try and de-mystify the idea, Bullough came up with his own word: Moneyland. "I invented 'Moneyland' to try and get my own head around this problem, basically," he says.

[...] One of the greatest stumbling blocks in addressing the issues around offshore tax havens, Bullough says, is that the very term is relatively ambiguous and generally difficult to conceptualise. "'Offshore' isn't a place, it's not the British Virgin Islands or Hong Kong or whatever," he says. "'Offshore' just means not here; elsewhere. It's a legal construct that essentially means something can hide without being anywhere in particular."

To try and de-mystify the idea, Bullough came up with his own word: Moneyland. "I invented 'Moneyland' to try and get my own head around this problem, basically," he says. Moneyland — also the name of Bullough's book on the issue — makes up roughly 10 per cent of the world's wealth, he says. "If you look at its economy, it is the third biggest economy in the world after America and China, it's absolutely massive." Bullough declares London to be the likely capital of Moneyland, followed closely by New York. According to Oxfam, the top three-and-a-half dozen people in the world this year owns the same amount of stuff as the bottom 3.5 billion people in the world.

How far does the Gini curve have to bend before something snaps?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 15 2018, @07:50PM (3 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday October 15 2018, @07:50PM (#749198)

    Be a 'progressive' who can't believe anyone with more money than him could possibly have gotten it without stealing it

    I'm as progressive as they come, and I don't believe *everybody* richer than me stole it. For example, most doctors, top-firm lawyers, superstar athletes, and the top actors are quite a bit richer than me, and they earned much of that by doing highly skilled work with the sweat of their own brow.

    That's not how people end up super-rich though.

    Compare, say, LeBron James (who is definitely rich, but not a billionaire) to Steve Ballmer (who's among the richest people in the world). To get the kind of money LeBron has he has to come up with $6200 every waking hour of his adult life, whereas for Ballmer you're looking at $220,000 every waking hour of his adult life. Which means that Ballmer's rate is about 40 times LeBron's. All available evidence is that LeBron worked and continues to work his butt off, and is at or at least near the top of a highly demanding and highly demanded profession. Meanwhile, Ballmer did not do a good job of being CEO of Microsoft (just look at the stock price - it's done a lot better both before and after Ballmer was in charge). Based on that, it's reasonable to conclude there's a reason that Ballmer is worth 40 LeBron's that has nothing to do with either merit or effort or skill.

    And the reason is staring you right in the face: LeBron got his money mostly from the work he does, by stepping out onto the court and playing professional basketball. By contrast, Ballmer got his money mostly from the work that other people did, from Tim Patterson to all the worker-bee developers to the army of company lawyers to the Chinese teenagers assembling XBoxes. And while Ballmer wasn't exactly "stealing", I think it's fair to question whether rewarding him as much as he was for the work that other people did is the most efficient system humans could come up with.

    Of course, another big chunk of the super-rich simply inherited the money as well. Again, this doesn't seem like the most efficient system we could come up with: The work that the Waltons could have done had they not inherited a life of leisure were lost, and the resources used to sustain the Waltons' lives of leisure could have been allocated to other potentially more useful activities.

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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:13PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:13PM (#749222)

    Totally accurate.

    I think the reason CEOs get such massive payouts is due to the criminal-capitalist corporate ethics. They are the ones that get the rope around their necks if something goes wrong, and with the sheer number of shitty things these massive corporations do it becomes a serious liability. So, pay them insane amounts to compromise ethics and wear a giant target 24/7.

    We need a functional UN and that will require it to have the dominant military force on the planet. Hahahahaha, yeaaah, that'll happen any day now!

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:17PM (#749281)

      I think the reason CEOs get such massive payouts is due to the criminal-capitalist corporate ethics. They are the ones that get the rope around their necks if something goes wrong

      But they don't. They get golden parachutes.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:08PM (#749624)

      yeah, so they can rape and sex worker traffic with global impunity! yay!