The Role of Secrecy in the Offshore System

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This analysis suggests a way for policymakers to thinking about who to sanction right so include wealth managers as well as the actual oligarchs and also target the hubs. The trick of it all is figuring out what are the hubs that is some of that's often guarded with the greatest amount of secrecy because the people who organized these networks know that if anyone knows what the real hub of the system is they're in big trouble is there.

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

Web site with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/

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Brooke Harrington received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Among her awards are the IPM Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.

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