14 July 2020
Oliver Bullough is the author of Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back, an urgent, searing account of corruption in the world’s financial systems. Moneyland was a Sunday Times bestseller, Waterstones Book of the Month, shortlisted for The Orwell Prize, Sunday Times Business Book of the Year, and an Economist Book of the Year.
In this special edition of This Week in Moneyland, Oliver updates us on how Moneyland is faring in a time of pandemic.
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CORONAVIRUS HITS MONEYLAND
Spare a thought for the super-rich
Spare a thought for the super-rich. It’s difficult for all of us being confined to your home for an extended period, worrying about COVID-19 and unable to see your friends and relatives: but how much worse would it be if the lockdown was stopping you from reaching your yacht, your third home, or your second villa? See, there’s always someone worse off than yourself.
Fortunately, residents of Moneyland have access to services the rest of us lack. In normal times, those services might focus on wealth management, or private schooling, or finding a reliable crew for that yacht. In the time of the novel coronavirus, however, novel services are required.
If that yacht is in Malta, VistaJet is here to help. It’s laying on private jets to bring ultra-wealthy clients to the island, with the guarantee that they will have been freshly and comprehensively sanitised with a product that “uses a semi-permanent nano layer of silica to release anti-pathogen agents that act against infection over an extended period”, so that’s reassuring.
New Coronavirus-proof services – if you can afford them
A few weeks ago, I had a chat with a group of Swiss healthcare experts who have created a whole new medical concierge service, which doesn’t just provide bespoke insurance cover for the world’s most demanding clients, but also gives them access to the best doctors. It’s apparently very irritating to want treatment now, only to find that the consultants you need are busy treating COVID-19 patients. These guys could help with that, and make sure the medical professionals are adequately remunerated to keep them focussed on the ailments of very important patients.
Of course, the enduring worries haven’t gone away either. Limits on movement have severely upended tax planning: it’s suddenly so much harder to duck in and out of safe and stable countries without having to pay to support them, in the way the rest of us duck in and out of Starbucks for the free wifi. This is fertile ground for tax lawyers, and fortunately there are already innovative proposals to help their clients avoid the risk of having to pay to dig us all out of this hole. Watch this space for what those proposals are, but apparently the governments of Britain and Australia – to name but two – are open to discussing them.
Many such innovative proposals appeared the last time the world faced such bleak financial prospects: in fact, they always do. When countries are short of cash, their governments are invariably ready to listen to anyone who can promise new revenue streams.
Historical tax-dodging in times of crisis
When the Suez crisis froze the London banks’ access to finance back in the 1950s, innovative bankers came up with the offshore dollar market. A few years later, when steamships deprived the Cayman Islanders of their customary income from working on sailing boats, the territory got into the tax dodging business. Into the new millennium, when changes to global trade rules destroyed the St Kitts and Nevis sugar industry, the islands pioneered the sale of passports as a standardised commodity. After the last financial crisis, European countries started selling visas by the thousand. All of this benefited the super-rich, at the expense of the rest of us.
It’s a golden rule of Moneyland, never miss the money-making opportunity provided by a good crisis. And, once that opportunity has been seized, the world never goes back to the way it was. The question is: how can we stop that dynamic re-asserting itself now?
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