Hot Money and the Politics of Debt: From Watergate to Irangate from Afghanistan to Zaire... - Softcover

Naylor, R. T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0044401884 ISBN 13: 9780044401889

Publisher: Unwin Hyman, 1990

Synopsis

A ball of hot money rolls around the world. It seeks anonymity and political refuge. It dodges taxes and sidesteps currency controls. It rolls through offshore shell companies and secret bank accounts, phoney charities and fraudulent religious foundations. It is kept rolling by white-collar criminals, gun-runners, drug dealers, insurgent groups, scam artists, tax evaders, gold and gem smugglers, and, not least, secret service agents plotting coups and financing revolutions. R.T. Naylor explains the origins of this pool of hot and homeless money, its origins, its uses and abuses, how the world of high finance, corporate and governmental, became hostage to it, and the price the world is paying and will continue to pay until the hostages are released.This book was one of the first, and remains the most comprehensive, to dissect the world of offshore finance, capital flight, money laundering, and tax evasion. Once a subject of concern principally to tax authorities and finance ministries, since the September 11, 2001 hot and homeless money has now become a central preoccupation for police forces and intelligence services around the world.

About this title

About the Author:

R.T. Naylor is professor, economics, McGill University, and the author of many books, including Economic Warfare: Sanctions, Embargo Busting, and Their Human Cost, and Bankers, Bagmen, and Bandits: Business and Politics in the Age of Greed.

From Publishers Weekly:

McGill University economist Naylor depicts a postWW II intercontinental inferno of high finance involving deceit, corruption, fraud, greed, conspiracy, tax evasion, drug dealing, arms smuggling and politico-monetary "peekaboo" sleight-of-hand as government VIPs worldwide, international bankers, labor unions, the CIA, the Mafia, the Vatican, the Moonies, Latin American juntas, African potentates and Middle East terrorists, Hong Kong and Panama innovators, covert contra-aiders and assorted illicit combines variously divert billions from the economy of nations. Secret Swiss and "offshore" bank accounts, dummy corporations and the like siphon off "hot money," which in some cases, charges the author, may equal a country's entire national debt. "There would be no debt crisis," he concludes, "without large-scale capital flight." Dozens of such intrigues are chronicled here with massive data, some of it "alleged," "claimed," "rumored" or "likely," yet all of it rings with credibility.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Unwin Hyman
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0044401884
• ISBN 13: 9780044401889
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 507