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White to move and mate in two #645 - The Finance Curse [1]
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Date: 2025-03-27
How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
All this raises a couple of questions. Why do people with so much money fight so much harder than everyone else to get even richer, sometimes stooping to bestial levels of greed and cruelty to get what they want? How much is enough? And why is the world of great wealth suffused with a general spirit of heightened lawlessness? (One 2017 study found that tax evasion rates, at around 3 percent for the general population, rose to 25-30 percent for the richest 0.01 percent.)19 And how do wealth managers feel about what they’re doing in a world that seems headed steadily toward plutocracy?
Often when you confront wealth managers or tax haven operators with these questions, the responses come back as glib talking points, most of which we’ve all heard before. McDowell’s main answer was that everything he does is legal—in fact, his job is to make sure his clients stay on the right side of the law—and that escaping tax was okay because “we need government, no question about it, but they are not going to spend or save my dollar as well as I can spend or save it.” (I didn’t press him on whether private spending on yachts or paintings is “better” than government spending on roads or schools.) Others resort to easy phrases like “the politics of envy” or “punitive taxation” or the evils of “welfare queens” to decry redistribution or fairness toward poorer people, and those shorthands also serve as personal screens against thinking these issues through more deeply. All these views are, of course, greatly amplified by the use of money to protect money: the funding of think tanks, academics, journalist, and politicians to propagate these ideas.
A different cookie-cutter answer came from Ely Calil, a fabulously wealthy London-based oil trader and financier, who was asked by a journalist friend of mine why he fought so hard to get even richer. He said simply, “If you have to ask, you won’t understand.” Calil elaborated a bit, talking about the thrill of wining and outwitting others, but gave little more. A related answer is a version of what is known as Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good. The most ruthless, like Calil, will rise to the top, and the honorable, honest brokers will be left by the wayside. In 2004, Calil joined with Margaret Thatcher’s son, Mark, in a failed plot to fly in a planeload of mercenaries to overthrow the president of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea (a crazy story that, as it happens, I helped uncover).20
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