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The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making Us All Poorer
https://www.amazon.ca/Finance-Curse-Nicholas-Shaxson/dp/0802128475
Nov. 15 2019 by Nicholas Shaxson (Author)
Financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson first made his reputation studying the “resource curse,” seeing first-hand the disastrous economic and societal effects of the discovery of oil in Angola. He then gained prominence as an expert on tax havens, revealing the dark corners of that world long before the scandals of the Panama and Paradise Papers. Now, in The Finance Curse, revised with chapters exclusive to this American edition, he takes us on a terrifying journey through the world economy, exposing tax havens, monopolists, megabanks, private equity firms, Eurobond traders, lobbyists, and a menagerie of scoundrels quietly financializing our entire society, hurting both business and individuals.
Shaxson shows we got here, telling the story of how finance re-engineered the global economic order in the last half-century, with the aim not of creating wealth but extracting it from the underlying economy. Under the twin gospels of “national competitiveness” and “shareholder value,” megabanks and financialized corporations have provoked a race to the bottom between states to provide the most subsidized environment for big business, have encouraged a brain drain into finance, and have fostered instability, inequality, and turned a blind eye to the spoils of organized crime. From Ireland to Iowa, Shaxson shows the insidious effects of financialization on our politics and on communities who were promised paradise but got poverty wages instead.
We need a strong financial system—but when it grows too big it becomes a monster. The Finance Curse is the explosive story of how finance got a stranglehold on society, and reveals how we might release ourselves from its grasp.
对全球金融的灼热起诉，探索银行业如何从业务支持者发展到世界上最大的业务，并展示社会如何与金融霸权作斗争
金融记者尼古拉斯·沙克斯森（Nicholas Shaxson）首先在研究“资源诅咒”的声誉中，亲眼目睹了安哥拉发现石油的灾难性经济和社会影响。 然后，他作为避税天堂的专家获得了突出，在巴拿马和天堂论文的丑闻之前很久就揭示了这个世界的黑暗角落。 现在，在《金融诅咒》中，该章节的修订是该美国版的独有的章节，他带我们踏上了世界经济的恐怖旅程，暴露了税收天堂，垄断者，巨型商人，私募股权公司，私募股权公司，欧洲贸易商，游说者，游说者和Scoundrels的Menagrels。 悄悄地将我们整个社会的财政财务化，损害企业和个人。
Shaxson表明我们到了这里，讲述了在过去半个世纪中如何重新设计全球经济秩序的故事，目的不是创造财富，而是从基本经济中提取财富。 在“国家竞争力”和“股东价值”的双福音书中，Megabanks和Financializatizations激发了各州之间的竞赛，以提供最有补贴的大型企业的环境，鼓励了脑海，并促进了不稳定的不稳定。 ，不平等，对有组织犯罪的战利视而不见。 从爱尔兰到爱荷华州，Shaxson展示了金融化对我们的政治和被许诺天堂但贫穷工资的社区的阴险影响。
我们需要一个强大的财务系统，但是当它变得太大时，它就会成为怪物。 金融诅咒是关于金融如何束缚社会的爆炸性故事，并揭示了我们如何从其掌握中释放自己。
The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer – review
The author and journalist Nicholas Shaxson gives a chilling account of the financial sector’s stranglehold on the UK
在阅读尼古拉斯·沙克森 (Nicholas Shaxson) 在金融诅咒中对伦敦金融城对我们经济影响的严厉分析时，我想起了这个危险的陷阱。 在讲述英国避税天堂故事的开创性金银岛之后七年，这本新书扩大了他对现代全球化金融体系基础的攻击。
Shaxson 认为，金融部门已经变得如此庞大，以至于它的引力场扭曲了周围的一切。 它现在不是为实体经济服务，而是掠夺它。 我本来希望看到他声称伦敦金融城自 1990 年以来已花费英国 4.5 万亿英镑的说法背后的工作原理，但宏大的分析完全令人信服：我们迷上了伦敦金融城及其带来的热钱，就像克里姆林宫一样 沉迷于鞭打自己的纳税人。
这本书从微观层面开始，首先是在 Trainline 应用程序上购买车票——这是大多数人没有考虑太多的事情——然后是 75 便士的预订费离开买家银行账户后的旅程。 资金通过英国、泽西岛、英国、泽西岛、卢森堡和开曼群岛的账户反弹，最后流入美国。
堆放在 Trainline 应用程序之上的这种上层建筑的目的是尽可能多地从税务人员那里获得利润，从而使我们的政府缺乏维护铁路所需的资金。 “企业老板和他们在金融领域的顾问已经从为经济创造财富转向从经济中榨取财富，”沙克森写道。
这本书广泛讨论了“竞争力议程”的哲学理由，即国家需要像公司一样相互竞争的想法。 他进一步分析了越来越多的共识，即当战后布雷顿森林体系在 70 年代离岸金融的重压下崩溃时，现代世界的一个关键转折点出现了。
伦敦金融城是破坏布雷顿森林体系资本控制的核心，一旦这些控制消失，它就可以更广泛地出口其有利可图的发明。 这导致“经济增长放缓、不平等加剧、市场效率低下、公共服务受损、腐败加剧、替代经济部门空心化，以及对民主和社会的广泛破坏”，在国内外。
在过去的几年里，人们普遍嘲笑那些说他们在政治上感到无家可归的英国人（完全披露：我偶尔也是其中之一）但沙克森在我们的核心列出了激进主义形状的洞的尺寸 政治，金融化通过它进入了我们国家的每一个角落。
两个主要政党都在这个问题的边缘进行修补，但显然未能理解解决扼杀社会的垄断的紧迫性，以及声称对他们有利的银行也对我们有利。 Shaxson 要求彻底透明以揭示谁拥有什么，作为防止从中国、俄罗斯和其他地方流入的盗贼资本的核心防御措施，以及征收土地价值税以削弱避税天堂，并彻底禁止一些热钱。
这将需要在政治上做出艰难的决定：我们不会成为纽约市希望我们成为的人民币的重要交易中心； 我们需要拆分四大会计师事务所； 科技巨头需要受到监管，这样他们才能为我们的利益而不是他们自己的利益行事。 从某种意义上说，这是用来证明减税合理性的拉弗曲线的渐进版本：如果我们限制金融，我们都会有更多的钱。
金融诅咒是改善我们国家的激进、紧迫和重要的宣言，它从英国实际所在的地方开始——一个完全开放、高度脆弱的经济体，完全被我们的金融业改变——而不是我们的主要政党希望它成为的地方， 无论他们是回到 1950 年代还是 1890 年代。 这场争论不应该是真正的政党政治，但它挑战了英国政治长达数十年的主旨，要赢得这场争论将需要一场艰苦的斗争。 然而，如果我们不想重蹈苏联覆辙，那我们就必须打一场仗。
In its final decades, the Soviet Union was hooked on alcohol. It needed the revenue from selling vodka, and it needed the booze to keep its citizens happy. But there was a problem: the more Soviet citizens drank, the less they worked, and the more the economy withered. It was a vicious circle, with no clear exit, that helped doom the whole communist project.
I was reminded of this parlous trap while reading Nicholas Shaxson’s excoriating analysis of the City of London’s effect on our economy in The Finance Curse. Coming seven years after his groundbreaking Treasure Islands, which told the story of Britain’s tax havens, this new book broadens his assault on the foundations of the modern globalised financial system.
Shaxson argues the financial sector has become so big that its gravitational field has distorted everything around it. Instead of serving the real economy, it now preys on it. I would have liked to have seen the working behind his claim that the City has cost Britain £4.5tn since 1990, but the grand analysis is utterly convincing: we are hooked on the City and the hot money it brings in, just like the Kremlin was addicted to flogging spirits to its own taxpayers.
The book starts at the micro level, with the purchase of a ticket on the Trainline app – something most people do without giving it much thought – and then follows the 75p booking fee’s journey after it leaves the buyer’s bank account. The money bounces through accounts in the UK, Jersey, the UK again, Jersey again, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, before ending up in the US.
The purpose of this superstructure piled on top of the Trainline app is to keep as much profits as possible away from the taxman, thus starving our government of the money it needs to – among other things – maintain the railways. “The corporate bosses and their advisers in the financial sector have moved away from creating wealth for the economy, and towards extracting wealth from the economy,” Shaxson writes.
The book roams widely through the philosophical justification for the “competitiveness agenda”, the idea that countries need to compete with one another in the same way companies do. And he adds further analysis to the growing consensus that a key inflexion point for the modern world came when the postwar Bretton Woods system collapsed under the weight of offshore finance in the 70s.
The City was central to the undermining of the capital controls of Bretton Woods and, once those controls were gone, could export its lucrative inventions ever more widely. That led to “lower economic growth, steeper inequality, inefficient markets, damage to public services, worse corruption, the hollowing out of alternative economic sectors, and widespread damage to democracy and to society”, abroad and at home.
Over the past couple of years, there has been widespread mockery of Brits who say they feel politically homeless (full disclosure: I’ve occasionally been one of them) but Shaxson lays out the dimensions of the radicalism-shaped hole at the heart of our politics, through which financialisation has entered every corner of our country.
Both major parties have tinkered around the edges of the issue, but signally failed to understand the urgency of tackling the monopolies that are strangling society, as well as the banks that claim what is good for them is also good for us. Shaxson demands radical transparency to reveal who owns what, as a core defence against kleptocratic capital flowing in from China, Russia and elsewhere, as well as a land-value tax to defang the tax havens, and outright bans on some hot money.
This would require politically difficult decisions: we would not become the great trading centre for China’s yuan that the City wants us to be; we would need to break up the big four accountancy firms; the tech giants would need to be regulated so they act in our interest, rather than their own. In a sense, this is a progressive version of the Laffer curve used to justify tax cuts: if we restrict finance, we’ll all have more money.
The Finance Curse is a radical, urgent and important manifesto for improving our country, starting from where Britain actually is – a wide-open, highly vulnerable economy utterly transformed by our finance industry – rather than where our major parties would like it to be, whether they’re harking back to the 1950s or to the 1890s. This argument should not really be party political, but it challenges the decades-long thrust of British politics, and winning it will require a hard fight. If we don’t want to go the way of the USSR, however, it’s a fight we need to have.
