Book Review: Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson

By Catherine Austin Fitts

“Tax havens are the most important single reason why poor people and poor countries stay poor. They lie at the very heart of the global economy, with over half the world trade processed through them. They have been instrumental in nearly every major economic event, in every big financial scandal, and in every financial crisis since the 1970s, including the latest global economic downturn. In Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson shows how this happened, and what this means for you.” ~ Penguin Books

Nicholas Shaxson is an investigative journalist who is a former correspondent for the Financial Times and The Economist. Over the years, Shaxson has dug into the extraordinary and rising levels of financial criminality around the world and connected the dots to the economic and financial deterioration that we now endure.

In Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, published in 2011, Shaxson makes the case that the secretive offshore tax haven systems play a primary role in supporting and making financial criminality go—with as much as a quarter of global wealth avoiding taxes by using the havens. Not surprisingly, the Anglo-American alliance (the United Kingdom and the U.S.) is in the lead in market share, with the City of London at the center of the “Spider’s Web”—the name given to the offshore networks in John Christensen’s excellent documentary highlighting much of his work with Shaxson.

Understanding the offshore system is not easy. Its highly complex and secretive strategies involve complex legal and financial structures in multiple jurisdictions. Shaxson does a marvelous job of helping the reader through the complexity of big money, while keeping the stories human and the pace at an entertaining tempo.

If you want to understand Plunder Capitalism, it is essential to appreciate the role of the offshore havens. Whether the indicator is skyrocketing health expenses, lower life expectancy, or ballooning trade deficits, the U.S. and UK are reaping the harvest of our economic dependency on financial speculation and crime. The rewards to a few have been extraordinary, but we are in the process of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Shaxson and his colleague and ally John Christensen have done a remarkable job of lifting the veil for us to see what has been happening. If you are part of the journey to live in a society that rewards economic contribution and performance instead of land grabs, financial fraud, and the creation of oligarchs with government subsidy and engineering, you will enjoy reading Shaxson’s Treasure Islands and watching Christensen’s The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire.