'If you're a progressive, in Britain or elsewhere, and if you think the movement needs fresh ideas, read this book, it's full of them. Then get to work' The Guardian\n'It ought to be required reading for every civil servant, regulator and politician in the UK and elsewhere'Literary Review\nFinancial malpractice, we're told, is an aberration: the actions of a few bad apples deviating from the norms of a market-governed process and gaming the system. In Sabotage, political scientists Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan blow this fiction apart, showing that sabotage is not an anomaly, but part of the business model of finance - and always has been.\nAbusive lending practices, misleading investors, manipulating prices, deliberately falsifying figures, cheating, obstruction and taking advantage of 'the dumbest person in the room' - they're actually the main source of profitability in finance, and the surest way to a bonus. If you want to make money in the industry, you need to find ways of sabotaging either your clients, your competitors or the government (or all three), and above all, the market itself. Talking to industry insiders, economists and high net worth customers, examining the history of finance and its workings today, the authors show us how the idea of sabotage not only makes sense of all past economic crises, but must also be at the heart of all future regulations.

Sabotage: The Business of Finance

Business & Money

Palan, Ronen

Nesvetailova, Anastasia

Business Culture

Penguin

Allen Lane.

Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Cornell Studies in Money)

From the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man to the Principality of Liechtenstein and the state of Delaware, tax havens offer lower tax rates, less stringent regulations and enforcement, and promises of strict secrecy to individuals and corporations alike. In recent years government regulators, hoping to remedy economic crisis by diverting capital from hidden channels back into taxable view, have undertaken sustained and serious efforts to force tax havens into compliance. 
In Tax Havens, Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux provide an up-to-date evaluation of the role and function of tax havens in the global financial system-their history, inner workings, impact, extent, and enforcement. They make clear that while, individually, tax havens may appear insignificant, together they have a major impact on the global economy. Holding up to $13 trillion of personal wealth―the equivalent of the annual U.S. Gross National Product―and serving as the legal home of two million corporate entities and half of all international lending banks, tax havens also skew the distribution of globalization's costs and benefits to the detriment of developing economies. The first comprehensive account of these entities, this book challenges much of the conventional wisdom about tax havens. The authors reveal that, rather than operating at the margins of the world economy, tax havens are integral to it. More than simple conduits for tax avoidance and evasion, tax havens actually belong to the broad world of finance, to the business of managing the monetary resources of individuals, organizations, and countries. They have become among the most powerful instruments of globalization, one of the principal causes of global financial instability, and one of the large political issues of our times.

Murphy, Richard

Chavagneux, Christian

Reference

Cornell University Press

The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires

The atlas of contemporary capitalism is curious indeed. A desperately poor and civil-war-wracked nation, Liberia, is the world's shipping superpower; the Cayman Islands the fifth-largest financial center in the world; land-locked Zurich a venerable "offshore" banking center. Indeed, it is estimated that half of the global stock of money passes through tax havens. The logic of the offshore world, where millionaires and corporations roam in search of financial advantage, is slippery. It challenges many conventional assumptions about power and economics.
In the single most comprehensive account of the offshore economy, Ronen Palan investigates the legal spaces, unregulated and yet maintained and supported by the state system, that have emerged for purposes of international finance, tax havens, export processing zones, flags of convenience, and e-commerce. 
The offshore economy had its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, saw early development after the First World War, and metastasized in the 1970s. Palan believes that a rapidly expanding offshore economy is now producing a new market in sovereignty; states have discovered that their rights to write law may be used as a commercial asset. This commercialization of sovereignty, he asserts, undermines the legitimacy of the nation-state and supports a form of nomadic capitalism.

Economics

In State Strategies in the Global Political Economy, Palan, Abbott and Deans argue that the state is not about to decline of 'wither away', but must restructure and evolve in response to forces of transnationalization. The state may be besieged but it can fight back and reorganize itself. The nature of this reorganization, the alleged shift from the welfare state to the 'competition state' is as much a response to changing global circumstances as it is an instrument of further change. The authors examine the plethora of competitive strategies adopted by the modern state: from the exclusive hegemonic strategies of the most powerful states to the parasitical strategies of the mini-states that serve as tax havens and flags of convenience; from the egalitarianism of the welfare policies of the Shielders to the repressed and exploited labour forces of 'downworldly mobile' Third World states; from the emerging continental economies of NAFTA and the EU to the utter despair of collapsed states structurally unable to compete in the world economy. By investigating these strategic responses, the authors present a comprehensive study of the tactics and strategies employed by states to achieve greater stability and strength within the global political economy.

State Strategies In The Global Political Economy (Continuum Collection)

Deans, Phil

Continuum Intl Pub Group

I don't like the word 'sabotage',"--a former Goldman Sachs trader admitted. "It's just harsh.... Though, frankly, how else do you make money in this business...I mean, real money." The fundamental motive for financial innovation is not to make the system work better, but to avoid regulation and oversight. This is not a bug of the financial system, but a built-in feature. The president of the US is not a tax avoider because he is an especially fraudulent financier; he's a tax avoider because he is a wealthy man in a system premised on such deceit. Finance is an industry of sabotage. This book is a brilliant, intellectual detective story that traces the origins of financial sabotage, starting with the work of a prescient American economist who saw the capacity for banks and businesses to dissemble and profit as early as the 1920s. What was accomplished modestly in the first half of the 20th century became a booming global industry in the 1980s. Financialization took over everything, culminating in instruments so complex and confusing their own creators were being destroyed by them in 2008. With each financial bust, people expect to hear who the culprit was, and cynically know to not expect much punishment to ever reach them. But the innovation of this book is to show that each individual gaming the system isn't a crook---the whole system is sabotage.

Sabotage: The Hidden Nature of Finance

PublicAffairs

Spinal Cord Injury: A Guide to Functional Outcomes in Physical Therapy Management

This work examines the plethora of competitive strategies adopted by the modern state: from the exclusive hegemonic strategies of the most powerful states to the parasitical strategies of the mini-states that serve as tax havens and flags of conveniencethe welfare policies of the "shielders" to the repressed and exploited labour forces of "downwardly mobile" Third World states; from emerging continental economies of NAFTA and the EU, to the utter despair of collapsed states structurally unable to compete in the world economy. By investigating these strategic responses, this book presents a comprehensive study of the tactics and strategies employed by states to achieve greater stability and strength with the global political economy.

State Strategies in the Global Political Economy

Abbott, Jason

Pinter Pub Ltd

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