Dirty Secrets

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

    Owen Jones, author of The Establishment
  • 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.

    Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands
  • 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.

    Prospect