Treasure Islands

[Lord Mayor of London. Isn't that quaint? not, if you read this article]

I went to a talk at the London School of Economics and nobody was killed, or pepper-sprayed.
That's strange, because if an important person in the City of London knew what was being said there he would not have been pleased.
Nevertheless, it was told to a small audience of 300, and we don't have any friends.

who spoke? Nick Shaxson
What did he write? Treasure Islands, a book about tax havens
what did we learn? The City of London is an offshore tax haven.

You know how I say that I'm living in London? Well, all of us Londoners are bullshitters.
We live in other jurisdictions that happen to be linked geographically to the
Square Mile, the City of London.
That City has not residents, just financial business, banks, insurers, etc.
The FIRE economy (Finance, insurance and real estate)
The City has a Lord Mayor, who goes around the world drumming up
business for the FIRE.

Illegal business? No problem.
Mafia? No problemo
Despot fleecing your own country? Welcome to London.

The Lord Mayor doesn't have a 'people', he has a 'money'. He's the mayor of money.

You'da thought that the entire country of England, being as the UK is in the EU,
would also be under the laws of the UK and the EU. But it isn't.
Rich people can send their money to London, and it just goes off the tax radar.

It's an official offshore, within, or right under the nose of, the EU,
as are

Lichtenshite,
Luxemberk,
Monacle,
Have-a-cow Jersey,
Isle o' Maneaters,
Dead Man on a Gurny Geurnsey

and many of the former island colonies in the Caribbean.

of the 66 tax havens, 31 are British, in some way. 15 of the top 30 are British.
The biggest offshore is the US. Then it's Switzerland and then the UK.

Private individuals have 10 trillion stashed away, and companies have ???who knows. This costs about 250-500 billion in lost revenue to the governments of the world, every year.
This money-hiding service doesn't come cheap, but we're not talking about the postman stashing his paycheck.

His thoughts?
Something has to be done, because this undermines democracy.
He's surprised nobody had ever written such a book, ever.
The LSE is a training ground for banksters.

He had some Lord guy there, Glasman, who had stuff to say about
using our right of association to stop this. Pretty funny stuff.
He was 'mr cool'.

My thoughts, tying together old strands:
1. One reason Cyprus was put into the EU, with its hands tied, is that it was also an offshore, and Britain wanted to stop the shenanigans... from leaving its shores.

2. I now know why the US has been working so hard with the IMF, the ratings agencies and the Wall Street banksters to rob the world. They want to keep their position as top pirate on the high seas of finance. They are advertising themselves as the

baddest offshore mafia-country,

to drum up more laundering business from all the corrupt despots in the world.

-Costick67 ~(8^P

checkitout
from LSE calendar:

Speakers: Dr Maurice Glasman, Nicholas Shaxson
The City of London is an offshore island inside the British nation state, floating partly free from the democratic rules and restraints that bind the rest of us and fed by a network of tax havens around the world. Nicholas Shaxson and Maurice Glasman look at how this secretive network emerged and came to underpin the City's fearsome political and economic powers today.
Maurice Glasman, recently appointed Labour Peer and Reader in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of Unnecessary Suffering.
Nicholas Shaxson is the author of Poisoned Wells, the Dirty Politics of African Oil, an associate fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and an experienced journalist.