So by now I am sure most know about the Panama Papers which were files taken from law firm of Mossack Fonseca and passed to journalist. The law firm says it was hacked which, in my mind, makes it worse. If someone inside the firm stole the files that could be a defense. If the firm was acting in bad faith in securing client files, that is a basic trust issue, and I don’t see the firm lasting a long time.
In any case, looking at an article in Slate, a fact emerges that I have not heard widely covered as of yet:
Mossack Fonseca may be a Panamanian firm but it has ties to almost 1,100 U.S. companies that were largely set up in Nevada and Wyoming since 2001.
and
The United States has emerged as “an active competitor in the ‘corruption services’ business,” writes Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota have all made it easier to set up shell companies and harder for authorities to figure out who are the real owners. “Bankers say that has actually prompted a flow of foreign assets from traditional tax havens such as Zurich and Bermuda to less elegant banking centers like Reno and Sioux Falls,” notes McManus.
This would seem to indicate that when we are talking about taxing wealth fairly, when we are talking about a level playing field that allows all Americans to compete, we may not be talking about Wall Street, but rather the West where the fiction of independence and hard work and a tradition of lawlessness leads to money laundering. Basically, those states that are the basis of the American West are protecting the assets of criminals.
The assertion of the article is that there are few US citizens in the Panama papers because there are no non-US money launderers superior to those in Nevada. I would think this revelation would change our trajectory on financial reform. The fact that entire states in the US are criminal money laundering hubs is frightening, almost as frightening as the prevalence of usury in the US overall.