Taxing Tax Havens

The Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5 million leaked documents belonging to the law firm Mossack Fonseca in Panama, has implicated dozens of world leaders and celebrities in offshore banking and tax evasion. And yet these revelations are small when compared to the actual size of global financial crime. Panama, after all, is only one of more than 90 financial secrecy jurisdictions around the world today, compared with just a dozen or so in the early 1970s. Together, as of 2015, they hold at least $24 trillion to $36 trillion in anonymous private financial wealth, most of which belong to the top 0.1 percent of the planet’s wealthiest."Taxing Tax Havens" is from foreignaffairs.com, published on April 12, 2016