"The study demonstrates, yet again, that the super-
rich are a law onto themselves, living in a world
completely separate from the vast majority of
humanity."
Study: The ultra-rich hide 25 percent of their wealth in tax havens
rich are a law onto themselves, living in a world
completely separate from the vast majority of
humanity."
Study: The ultra-rich hide 25 percent of their wealth in tax havens
By Gabriel Black
5 June 2017
5 June 2017
A study released May 28 by University
of
California Berkeley economist Gabriel
Zucman and two Scandinavian colleagues,
“Tax Evasion and Inequality,” demonstrates
that global wealth inequality is drastically
underestimated in official statistics because of
how successful the super-rich are at evading
taxes.
California Berkeley economist Gabriel
Zucman and two Scandinavian colleagues,
“Tax Evasion and Inequality,” demonstrates
that global wealth inequality is drastically
underestimated in official statistics because of
how successful the super-rich are at evading
taxes.
According to the paper, the super-rich, that is the top .01
percent, hide some 25 percent or more of their wealth. This is primarily due to
the exploitation of offshore tax havens that allow them to avoid paying taxes
where their income is actually accrued, and where they actually live.
The study demonstrates, yet again, that the super-rich are a
law onto themselves, living in a world completely separate from the vast
majority of humanity. Earlier this year, Oxfam reported that only eight men
control as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. However, the findings of
this new paper suggest that wealth concentration is even higher.
The authors of the paper write, “The many data sets used in
this article all paint the same picture: the probability to hide assets rises
very sharply with wealth, including within the very top groups. As a result,
offshore wealth turns out to be extremely concentrated. By our estimate, the
top 0.01% of the distribution owns about 50% of it [offshore wealth].”
They conclude, “this implies that the top 0.01% hides about
25% of its true wealth”
Zucman explained to the Los
Angeles Times, “There’s a big industry providing wealth management services
for the super-wealthy all over the world. … Once you cross a certain threshold
of over $50 million, you get offered those services.”
The study’s authors, Anette
Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, rely on several sources to
make their analysis. The first and most important is leaked data from HSBC
Private Bank (Suisse), the Swiss arm of HSBC, the sixth-largest private bank in
the world. The data from HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), which was exposed in
2015, shows how the bank hides billions of dollars of taxable money for
corporations such as Google and Amazon, as well as a variety of extremely
wealthy clientele. The dirty stream of money exposed in the leak went as high
as former US President Bill Clinton, and involved several billionaires and
public figures.
Another source they use is the data
from the Panama Papers,
the massive leak of files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack-Fonseca in
2016. Those files showed how the law firm made millions of dollars helping
politicians and the super-rich stash their money and hide it to evade taxation.
A third source they use is data from Norwegian, Danish and
Swedish tax authorities showing households who voluntarily disclosed previously
hidden assets in exchange for tax amnesty. Zucman, et al. were able to match
assets exposed by the 2015 HSBC leak and the Panama Papers with government data
in the Scandinavian countries. This method allowed them to understand the
average amount of wealth the super-rich said they had versus what they actually
had in undisclosed accounts.
The paper showed that in Norway, when offshore assets are
added, the Norwegian super-rich show a 30 percent rise in income and the
increase is likely to be higher in other countries.
“Because most Latin American, and many Asian and European
economies own much more wealth offshore than Norway, the results found in
Norway are likely to be lower than for most of the world’s countries,” the
authors noted.
Zucman told the Los Angeles
Times, “There is good reason to believe that the very steep gradient [in
tax evasion by the wealthy] is also the case in the US.”
According to the conservative figures of the Internal
Revenue Service, which does not cover legal tax havens, $406 billion in taxes
are unpaid every year. An investigation into the HSBC leak by the CBS News
program “60 Minutes” showed that the Swiss bank run by HSBC had about 4,000 US
taxpayers with wealth exceeding $13 billion.
The individual tax evasion highlighted in the report, however,
is only part of a much broader phenomenon. Tax evasion in the US literally
takes place on an industrial scale and is built into the business model of
major US corporations.
It has been estimated that US firms hold about $2 trillion
in cash on offshore holdings largely to escape paying US taxes—an amount
roughly equivalent to 14 percent of American gross domestic product.
The most prominent example is Apple which holds $240 billion
out of its $256 billion in cash reserves offshore in order to avoid paying
taxes on this money if it repatriated it. At the same time, it borrows tens of
billions of dollars in the US, much of it in order to finance share buybacks
and dividend payments in order to boost its share value.
The operation of this seemingly perverse logic—borrowing
money while having an ocean of cash on hand—is the outcome of policy decisions
of the US Federal Reserve since the eruption of the financial crisis of 2008
aimed at boosting the wealth of the financial elite.
Its policy of quantitative easing, which has pumped around
$4 trillion into the US financial system coupled with the maintenance of
ultra-low interest rates, means that Apple only has to pay interest ranging
between 1.6 and 4.3 percent to finance operations that boost the value of its shares—far
less than the cost in taxes that it would have to pay if it repatriated its
overseas holdings.
As a result of these and other financial machinations,
Apple’s total market value passed $800 billion earlier this year and is well on
the way to the $1 trillion mark while the social cost of these operations is
borne by millions of working-class families who are deprived of vital services
because it is claimed that government has no money to pay for them.
Apple, however, is only the biggest example of a process
which extends across the corporate world. Among the other big holders of
overseas cash reserves are: Microsoft, with $113 billion; Cisco Systems, with
$62 billion; Oracle, with $52 billion and Google’s parent company, Alphabet,
with $49 billion.
These figures underscore the fact that tax evasion and the
gains secured by the “malefactors of great wealth” are not the result simply of
their individual actions but are the product of an economic and political order
of, by and for the rich.
“But what the Clintons do is
criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And
they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves
and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core
beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the
planet by now.”
Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested
administration!
BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!
“Citigroup’s recommendations came just
three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the
Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion
in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single
biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion
in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306
billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related
assets.”
MUCH MORE HERE:
“As president, Obama not
only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a
single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and
swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and
he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out
firms.”
“So
when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013,
while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other
Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man
who belonged in prison.”
CRONY
BANKSTER LOOTING OF AMERICA
THEIR GOLDEN AGE OF PLUNDER IS NOT OVER!
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS
NOR INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH BANKSTER CRONIES MORE THAN OBAMA!
And
while the Obama administration worked systematically
to bail out the banks and
make the financial oligarchy richer
than ever, shielding the architects of the
Great Recession
from criminal prosecution, it did impose fines for some of the
banks’ grossest swindles, including the sale of worthless
subprime
mortgage-backed securities, the rigging of key
global interest rates such as
the London Interbank Offered
Rate (Libor), drug money laundering, illegal home
foreclosures and other illicit activities.
BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL
BANKSTERS AND THE
LA RAZA
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….
There’s more than one way to
destroy America’s white middle class!
HSBC laundered hundreds of
millions and perhaps billions
of dollars for drug cartels responsible
for the deaths of tens
of thousands of people over the past two decades.
The bank
transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking
proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel
in Mexico, which is known for
dismembering its victims and
publicly displaying their body parts.
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS: THEIR GLOBAL LOOTING of the
POOR
THE OPEN BORDERS PARTY of GEORGE SOROS, HILLARY
& BILLARY CLINTON, BARACK OBAMA and DONALD TRUMP
DONALD TRUMP, HIS PARASITIC FAMILY, HIS GOLDMAN SACHS
REGIME and GOD FATHER, GEORGE SOROS… .global looters of the
poor!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-jared-kushner-donald-trump-george.html
THE OBAMA AND THE REVOLUTION: Will His Bid For A Third Term For Life Come
About? Will Illegals Vote the La Raza Supremacist Back Into the White House?
DESTROY AMERICA TO BUILD A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP WHERE LA RAZA
MEXICANS VOTE HIM PRESIDENT FOR LIFE
"He is intent on maximizing the damage he inflicted on
the country during the two terms of his faux presidency, having now
set up shop in Washington to pursue a post-presidency agenda advancing a
left-wing insurgency, civil unrest, racial conflict and the destabilizing activities of a shadow."
TRUMPERNOMICS: IMPLEMENTING
OBAMA-CLINTONIMCS
“CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WILL CONTINUE TO RULE
AMERICA!” Twitter Trumper
OBAMA-CLINTON-TRUMPERnomics: The
Massive Transfer of Wealth to the Super Rich Ratcheted up!
The American oligarchy, steeped in
criminality and parasitism, can produce only a government of war, social
reaction and repression. In its blind avarice, it is creating the conditions
for unprecedented social upheavals. It is hurtling toward its own revolutionary
demise at the hands of the working class.
BUT WE KNOW WHERE THEY LIVE!
“The massive transfer
of wealth will not go to investment, but to acquiring bigger diamonds; more
luxurious mansions, yachts and private jets; new private islands; more security
guards and better-protected gated communities to segregate the
financial nobility from the masses whom they despise
and fear.”
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike,
has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.
This is the way a
great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
BARACK OBAMA PLANS A THIRD TERM: HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, LA RAZA, MUSLIMS
AND THOSE MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS HE FUNDED ARE BEHIND HIM…. Along with George
Soros!
THE OBAMA COUP TO BE DICTATOR:
THE ARMY OF ILLEGALS TO BRING
AMERICA DOWN AND FORM THE OBAMA MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP THAT WILL BE OPEN
BORDERS AND PRO LA RAZA FASCIST SUPREMACY.
Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman
Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY)
“OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever
was.”
“Barack
Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible
machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were
not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as
wellas the
tacit support of the mainstream media.”
BARACK OBAMA PLANS A THIRD TERM: HIS CRONY BANKSTERS, LA RAZA, MUSLIMS
AND THOSE MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS HE FUNDED ARE BEHIND HIM…. Along with George
Soros!
THE OBAMA COUP TO BE DICTATOR:
THE ARMY OF ILLEGALS TO BRING
AMERICA DOWN AND FORM THE OBAMA MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP THAT WILL BE OPEN
BORDERS AND PRO LA RAZA FASCIST SUPREMACY.
Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman
Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY)
“OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever
was.”
THE LEGACY OF
BARACK OBAMA:
Final Death of the American White Middle Class
Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level.
Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts
of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the
Brookings Institution.
THE OBAMA BOOK DEAL: Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5
million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made
to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s
geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the
wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.
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