Hiding the world's wealth http://www.rabble.ca/books/reviews/2011/03/how-corporate-tax-breaks-hurt-humanity This book is a jaw-dropper of an exposé of how the moneyed elites use offshore to hide and grow their wealth and of how this affects the rest of humanity. Shaxson travels the world and delves into archives and financial reports to offer up some mind-boggling facts and figures. More than half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens. The balance sheets of small island finance centres alone add up to 18 trillion dollars, about a third of the world's GDP -- and that is probably an underestimate. Wealthy individuals hold over 11.5 trillion dollars offshore. That's about one quarter of the world's wealth.

It seems that just about everyone who is anybody is in on the act. Media baron Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which owns Fox News, HarperCollins, MySpace and Sun newspapers), for example, uses 152 offshore subsidiaries and so pays an estimated rock bottom six per cent tax rate. Even Bono, writes Shaxson, who "browbeats western taxpayers to boost aid to Africa, shifted his band's financial empire to the Netherlands [an important European tax haven] in 2006 to cut its tax bill."