Palgrave MacMillan Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

This 260 page book is a description of Offshore Tax Havens, based on the author's extensive investigations on behalf of The Tax Justice Network (an expert-led investigative group focused on the international harmful impacts of tax avoidance, tax competition and tax havens). This book proves that the City of London is the originator and still the center of the world's offshore banking: co-ordinating tax avoidance and money-laundering activities on a global scale. The author describes How and Why this major change happened and the key role this played in the recent Financial Crises. These new banking arrangements have facilitated both crime and the viability of nation states around the world. Not only have they lowered the standard of living of most working people in the developed countries but they have deepened the poverty of undeveloped countries. This book details a level of corruption that spans the world of international banking to an almost incredible degree.There seems to have arisen an implicit professional conspiracy involving lawyers, bankers and accountants, due to a common attitude of greed and selfishness. Offshore Banking is the last refuge of the medieval aristocrats, who believe only they deserve any real rewards. Few experts, including most economists, are unaware of the methods and negative impacts of offshore banking. The author's recommendations are repeated because this tragic situation is fixable: but it will need political will. This review helps to expose these criminal activities to a wider audience to hopefully end this world-wide EVIL. Many readers will try to skip reading this review, believing one must be an economist or accountant to understand or such international banking activities do not impact them. They are wrong on both counts, both the book (and this review are written for the general reader) because these activities are so global that they impact everyone on the planet, as the recent crises demonstrated.

This is an important and profound book that exposes what is really going on around the world. Rich elites with utterly depraved lack of morality are cheating, lying and thieving against the rest of the world's population in places such as that vile cesspool of depravity the Isle of Jersey, in the Cayman Islands--a vile place that has enabled criminality of the worst sort, of foolish places like the state of Delaware that allowed themselves to enable the destruction of their fellow Americans through the elimination on limits on interest payments and most of all through the actions of a little-known knothole within London, England known as the City of London.These various places and the bankers who have used their immoral devices to rob, cheat and steal from the community of the world, are the worst sort of filth on earth. If there were a God, the people whose actions are described in this monumental book would burn in a seething miasma of oil.While pretending to be honorable professionals, the bankers and hedge fund managers and accountants and attorneys who enable the practices described in detail in this book are the worst sort of scum, stealing from the poor, forcing others to pay the taxes they shirk, all while these same people benefit from the stable societies in the countries where they live and whose taxes they don't pay.Even more infamous, these same super wealthy and corporations complain about income taxes they claim are high while they in fact evade, lie and slime their way out of paying any of them. The super wealthy in America but all over the world now evade taxes almost 100% while whining and complaining about those same taxes, in the most astounding and shocking and angering display of venality you can imagine. In truth, no matter how bad you thought it was--these people who do business in Bermuda, in the Cayman Islands, in the Bahamas, in Manhattan, in Delaware, in the Isle of Jersey, Gurnsey, the Isle of Man, in the financial center of London called the "City of London" and in a thousand other places across the world--are 1,000,000 times worse than in your worst horror imaginings. These people are not only responsible for the finacial crisis--and for the destruction of economies going back to the mid 1980s. These self-justifying slime are the reason that our world is in trouble. They don't care and if this world is to be saved from destruction from within, each one of us owes it to humanity to say, I personally am not going to put up with this.In the United States, it is the super wealthy who screw everybody and their enablers are of course the Republicans but, I am horrified to realize, the Democrats are in the tank too.Read this book and see if you don't join my outrage. It's time for us to take action. Action--yes--you know what I mean. Not indignation but real action, the kind that comes out of a pitchfork. You, reading this in the Isle of Jersey, in the Cayman Islands. We are looking right at you. You have enabled these crimes. We know.

This is a fairly decent look at a topic I had no real prior knowledge of- Tax avoidance schemes used by large corporations. While the very basics of this topic are described, which was very informative, what Shaxson failed to do is really get into the nitty gritty and really describe how these schemes work. Imagine if I described an engine as a place where well timed explosions controlled by a spark plug go off inside a metal block with exhaust gasses blowing out the tail pipe. You don't really see how the wheels actually start moving- and thats how I often felt reading this book.Big claims were made about former colonies and developing countries being sucked dry by tax havens, but there were very few examples that were not really fleshed out enough. It often felt like the author was just putting a buckshot of facts on a wall, and leaving the reader to make the connections between the facts. The language was dry, yet somehow not informative- it was very difficult to get through certain sections of the book.What I learned from this book, I could have learned in roughly 30 pages. The rest was a lot of quotes from officials on how bad things are, and lots of terms like "bamboozling" which I feel were unnecessary editorialization- show me the actual money trail, and I can decide who is the bamboozler/bamboozlee.Personally I think this book could have used a bit of editing and more of a bottom-up approach. Walk me through how Apple gets away with paying an 8% (or whatever the number is) tax rate, then explain how others do the same thing, and I would have found the book a lot more compelling.

Very thoroughly detailed book that delves deep into the tax havens and the offshore system in general. Some very interesting characters brought into light. The last couple chapters of the book for me was a bit dry, not because of the content (which is phenomenal), but due to the dry nature of factual evidence after reading it repeatedly over time. It’s an amazing book and a must read in order to know more about the way the world works. For further visual representation of the what the book is focusing upon, one can watch the laundromat on Netflix.

The book was amazing! It dove deep into the financial crisis and what caused it (or what mostly caused it). It is a bit confusing if you're not familiar with economics but the author tries his best to simplify. (I actually had to re-read quite a few paragraphs to grasp some concepts). Some parts of the history portion felt a little bit repetitive but overall a fantastic book.