Offshore: The Dark Side of the Global Economy

This book review, which appears in the Washington Monthly and was forwarded to me by my dad, encouraged me to go out and get the book. Excerpt from article:

If America needs a new enemy, the Cayman Islands might be a refreshing choice. They're dismayingly wealthy, temptingly close by, and, with a population of only 41,000, surely defeatable. Any post-war occupation and reconstruction phase would probably last under 24 hours, including swim breaks.

Luckily, we're also miffed at them. John Kerry singled them out during the 2004 campaign, complaining, "There are enough brass-plate companies down in Georgetown, the Cayman Islands, different places, to make anybody in America sick when they look at their own tax bill." Tax-sheltering aside, there's also a Caymanian coziness with companies that later go bust--according to one investigator looking into Enron, "We found 441 entities setup in the Cayman Islands," most of which were "inactive shells." Even the Islands' essential selling points--tax-free banking, adventurous financial instruments (of the not-legal-in-some-states variety), sweeping secrecy laws--seem to carry the whiff of, well, prison.

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