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Dirty Secrets:How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy
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What happens when the rich are allowed to hide their money in tax havens, and what we should do about it
The Panama Papers demonstrated that the superrich hide their wealth from the rest of us. Dirty Secrets shows that this was not by accident, but by design. It was the result of a powerful alliance of the wealthy, their advisers and the state that has undermined all attempts to solve the tax haven problem.
This is because tax havens are the unacknowledged heart of globalized capitalism. Their purpose is to provide freedom from regulation. The exponents say this makes markets work and so we all gain. But this argument has now failed. Furthermore democracy itself is being threatened by the political fallout from the mistrust this regime has created.
The result is that tax havens are now a threat to the very system that supposedly spawned it. Dirty Secrets is the most revelatory examination of the crisis by a leading expert, but also offers solutions on how governments can regulate havens and what the world might look like without them.
Reviews
A rare voice of sanity at a time of economic madness
Backed by years of experience and fired by relentless energy and a burning sense of anger at what the offshore system of tax havens is doing to our fragile world, Richard Murphy’s tireless work at the leading edge of the tax justice campaigns has helped open the world’s eyes to the scale and nature of this growing, metastatising threat to our democracies and our economies. Dirty Secrets makes essential reading for those wanting to understand where it all went wrong.
Richard Murphy has for decades been a leading voice on the left arguing for international tax reform. He fizzes with ideas about how policy-makers should organise policies on an international scale … argues that if we manage to stamp out tax havens, the rewards will be bountiful: inequality will fall, and so too the cost of capital. Regulation, markets and even democracy will function better.
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The Panama Papers detailed corruption by design, and here the fearless author of The Joy of Tax uses them as a jumping-off point to detail, with insight, forensic precision and pugnacity, the truth behind the lie that tax havens are a reasonable part of global capitalism
Times Higher Education -
Murphy's book aggressively attacks the world’s tax havens—or 'secrecy jurisdictions,' as he calls them. Their most corrosive effect, in his judgement, is not to allow individuals (including criminals) and corporations to avoid or evade taxes, although that is important. Rather, the worst thing about tax havens is the way in which they prevent the kind of transparency in transactions that any well-functioning market requires ... If the secrecy jurisdictions were curtailed, the world would be a much better place, Murphy contends: democracies would be stronger, and markets more efficient.
, Foreign Affairs