Nicholas Shaxson has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 7 ratings. The most-rated is Treasure Islands.
Treasure Islands
Summary
Most people regard tax havens as being relevant only to celebrities, crooks and spivs, and mistakenly believe that the main offshore problems are money laundering and terrorist financing. These are only small parts of the whole picture. The offshore system has been (discreetly) responsible for the greatest-ever shift of wealth from poor to rich. It also undermines our democracies by offering the wealthiest members of society escape routes from tax, financial regulation, and other normal democratic controls. Treasure Islands brilliantly articulates the problem in a completely new way, and exposes the deep corruption that impacts on our daily lives. This is the ugliest chapter in global economic affairs since slavery - and secretive offshore tax havens are at the heart of the trouble.
©2011 Nicholas Shaxson (P)2011 Audible Ltd
The Finance Curse
Summary
Financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson first made his reputation studying the “resource curse,” seeing first-hand the disastrous economic and societal effects of the discovery of oil in Angola. He then gained prominence as an expert on tax havens, revealing the dark corners of that world long before the scandals of the Panama and Paradise Papers. Now, in The Finance Curse, he brings his knowledge to bear in an eye-opening investigation of how banks have overbalanced the economies of Western democracies, exerting an outsize effect on policy-making and effecting a brain drain of the brightest and best to the financial industry and its offshoots, much to the detriment of both business and broader society. How did we get to this situation? Shaxson describes the transformation of banks over the twentieth century as they changed from relatively small institutions that did well for themselves by serving the needs of business, to unfettered global behemoths. As the world reeled from World War II, the banks grew bigger in the post-war restructuring, experimenting with esoteric financial instruments like the Eurobonds in the 1960s, and then in the 1970s and ’80s taking increasingly high risks in order to compete with each other to return more profit to their demanding shareholders. Now these megabanks spread the fiscal gospel that business must be taxed as little as possible, that corporations need rights previously granted to humans, and encourage a fight to the bottom between states to provide the most subsidized environment for big business, in the name of “competitivity.” We need strong financial institutions - but when finance grows too big it becomes a curse. The Finance Curse is the explosive story of how finance got a stranglehold on society and how we might release ourselves from its grasp.
©2019 Nicholas Shaxson (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.