Late last month, New York Magazine published a lengthy and very important article titled: Stash Pad – Why New York Real Estate is the New Swiss Bank Account. The entire article is well worth a read, and left me shaking my head in disbelief the entire time. As someone who grew up in New York City, it’s a real … Read more
The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain’s financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons. Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, … Read more
It appears the music may have finally stopped for one of the world’s largest luxury real estate bubbles: London. It’s well known that foreign oligarchs love London real estate as a means to launder funds, typically “earned” by soaking their host countries dry via corruption and fraud. This has caused absurd and irrational spikes in high-end residential … Read more
It appears the music may have finally stopped for one of the world’s largest luxury real estate bubbles: London. It’s well known that foreign oligarchs love London real estate as a means to launder funds, typically “earned” by soaking their host countries dry via corruption and fraud. This has caused absurd and irrational spikes in high-end residential … Read more
Liberty Blitzkrieg has seen an uncharacteristically strong focus on London-centric posts today. Go figure. While the earlier post related to the likely bursting of the London real estate bubble, this one highlights a blistering critique of the role the City of London has played in transforming Great Britain into what George Monbiot calls a “civilized mafia … Read more
Out at my car I couldn’t be bothered to get into the whole ‘probable cause’ thing so I flung open the doors and with as much good cheer as I could muster, said: “Help yourself”. They did. While one set of police searched my car with their torches, another lot clustered round me and asked … Read more
Did you know there exists a highly lucrative business in America that consists of helping pregnant Chinese women get into the U.S. merely to give birth and get their children passports? Yep, neither did I. From Bloomberg: Fiona He gave birth to her second child, a boy, on Jan. 24, 2015, at Pomona Valley Hospital in … Read more
Our estimates show that the developing world lost US$991.2 billion in illicit financial flows in 2012, over ten times the amount of official development aid received by these countries in that year, and greater than the amount of net foreign direct investment received. From 2003 – 2012, US$6.6 trillion left developing country economies illicitly. Illicit … Read more
The most disingenuous and sickening type of status quo defender is the person who blames the recent expansion in wealth inequality on a “lack of skilled workers.” Such a person is either a liar or an imbecile. There’s not much wiggle room there. Either this person doesn’t know that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing (QE) … Read more
A major theme here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the past year has been the creative ways in which corrupt Chinese oligarchs and government officials are maneuvering their way into the United States. To be clear, I am not anti-immigration by any stretch of the imagination. My mother was an immigrant. This is about being against corrupt … Read more