The headline for this review is "Competition is for losers" but I didn't want to have to note "not Peter Thiel 2014", not in the header anyway so that stuff is after the jump.
From The Times Literary Supplement, May 9:
n an essay of 1946, George Orwell reminded readers that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”. In their complementary new books on the shadow global economy, the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and the sociologist Brooke Harrington assist us in this struggle. Starting from different points of origin, the authors seek to guide us around a world of financial skulduggery that determines much of our day-to-day lives in ways we rarely take the time to appreciate.
Abrahamian begins The Hidden Globe by reflecting on her upbringing in Geneva. Her narrative draws on China Miéville’s science fiction novel The City & the City (2009), with its portrait of twin cities that exist in the same geographical space, yet remain invisible to each other. The citizens of Besžel and Ul Qoma are trained from birth in the art of “unseeing”, so they cannot recognize what is immediately around them, and Abrahamian draws on this vision to consider how entire worlds can lie concealed within our urban geography.
In one chapter, named after Miéville’s novel, she posits Dubai as the model for how a lucrative special economic zone can be interwoven with the abuse of forgotten, precarious workers. In another, focused on the rise of the freeport, she considers how the image this entity might conjure up – of a bustling harbour of rogues and brigands – blinds us to its banal reality, and the extent to which the quotidian spaces that many of us navigate daily have been transformed invisibly into legal carve-outs from national law. “Freeports are all around us”, Abrahamian writes. They can be “stand-alone warehouses or industrial sites, entire districts, or one floor of an office building.” There are no signs as you enter the freeport notifying you that you are leaving one jurisdictional framework and entering another.
The deceptive subtlety of the twenty-first-century freeport is part of its appeal. So-called “wealth creators” treasure its ability to protect them from the taxes, regulations or labour protections that democratic polities tend to impose on them. As a result, many luxury assets and even daily commodities in economic circulation pass not from country to country, but from freeport to freeport. Abrahamian reminds us that “chances are, the car you drive, the appliances in your kitchen and the Amazon packages on your doorstep all spent time in a freeport of some kind before making their way to you”. We spend so much time arguing about how to push our governments to pass laws in different directions, but is it all futile when capital is passing in and out of these little escape routes? As the world descends into a trade war of reciprocal tariffs, The Hidden Globe reminds us that the wealthiest in society can easily circumvent such charges by moving their high-end art or luxury jewellery through freeports. If we want to understand how capital has become increasingly insulated from the pressures of the masses in the age of runaway wealth inequality, Abrahamian argues, we need to open our eyes to these loopholes that lie all around us.
Harrington follows Abrahamian down the rabbit holes that puncture our global system of state sovereignty in her punchy new book, Offshore. Where Orwell immersed himself among Europe’s indigent and homeless, as recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London, Harrington gains insight into the inequalities hidden in plain sight by finagling her way into the corridors of offshore wealth. Through her journey, she brings us face to face with the gatekeepers who guard access to the hidden financial hades flowing under our feet: the asset managers.
Her methodology is based on a key insight: while the wealthy are hard to reach, those who shepherd their riches are rather more accessible. Posing as a wealth manager in training, Harrington sneaks us into the luxury hotels where asset managers meet their aristocratic clients, the conferences where private wealth lawyers exchange tax avoidance schemes and the state department rooms where meetings take place between wealth managers and minor government officials of developing nations to ensure the given state’s laws are friendly to their clients.
Rather like Abrahamian, Harrington shows us that one prevailing image of the offshore world – of tropical islands filled with criminals and bags of dirty money – is woefully out of date. Both authors recognize that the operators of the hidden offshore economy do not run from the law, but turn towards it, using it as a weapon. As Harrington reminds us, “many uses of offshore are legal; the rest are often so complex that no one can prove that they are illegal”. Through the establishment of trusts, shell companies and layered ownership arrangements, all spread among multiple offshore jurisdictions whose governments have passed laws to ensure assets are protected from public scrutiny, the wealth managers ensure that their billionaire clients are protected from political volatility.
Harrington discovers that many of her subjects’ clients quite openly consider themselves “above nationality and laws”. For them, the countries that constitute such a key part of many peoples’ identities are little more than tools to be picked from a box and wielded for personal profit. As in The Hidden Globe, Harrington’s book shows us that the citizens of the offshore world are now escaping not just taxation, but also accountability. Many users of offshore services do not need to evade taxes: they already live in low-tax jurisdictions such as Switzerland or the Gulf states. Yet still they park their assets in the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands to avoid paying debts to business partners, to hide secret assets during divorce proceedings or to try to appear less wealthy than they are in order to run for political office. Most valuable to them, Harrington writes, is “the secrecy they purchase”.....
....MUCH MORE
And an ungated version of Peter Thiel's WSJ Op-Ed of the same name as the above review:
Competition Is for Losers
If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly, writes Peter
Thiel
If interested see also August 2015s "Peter Thiel’s Pursuit Of Technological Progress; It’s Not About Democracy and It’s Definitely Not About Capitalism – Part 1"
It's by Francine McKenna. Here's her substack:
https://thedig.substack.com/
And here's her curriculum vitae:
https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CV-McKenna-20220624-CV-1.pdf
