An attempt to uncover the dirty secrets of offshore banking.
Under the aegis of secrecy, the profits of some of the world’s most prominent corporations currently mingle with the dirty money of gangsters, despots and terrorists. Largely indifferent to the origin of this capital, most low-tax jurisdictions are instead keenly interested in getting a “cut of the action.” Shaxson’s (Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, 2008) story of offshore banking is nothing short of Shakespearean, a drama full of secrecy, treachery and corruption in which wealthy countries, companies and individuals collude to horde wealth in a complex global network of largely unregulated tax havens. To realize this end, they install corrupt leaders, exploit indigenous populations and, ultimately, deny both developed and developing nations of vital tax dollars. There is much here that should generate outrage. While the author does an admirable job of both arguing the consequences of offshore banking and providing a succinct history of the practice, his tone and style often work against his intentions. Overt declarations of outrage and heavy-handed moralizing suggest that readers may not be up to inferring the “right” conclusions on their own. Shaxson also too easily reduces the players in the drama to simple victims and villains. There is little nuance to his presentation, a fact underscored by his reluctance or refusal to acknowledge a position counter to his own—as tenuous as such a position may be. A potentially compelling look at a pernicious financial practice ultimately undone by the author’s tendency to condescend.
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-10501-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
An academic's generic advisories on what, with awesome self- assurance but no particularly fresh insights, she asserts it will take commercial enterprises and their host communities to prosper in the Global Village's increasingly interdependent economy. Noting that advances in communications, distribution, and transportation have effectively shrunk the world of business, Kanter (When Giants Learn to Dance, 1989, etc.) offers lucid if unsurprising commentary on the ways in which the global economy's imperatives now affect US industry at all levels. Withal, her digressive, anecdotal text represents as much an effort to encourage corporate and municipal America to embrace geopolitical change as an attempt to construe events in what she dubs ``the global shopping mall.'' In aid of this agenda, the author extols the potential rewards of cross-border alliances that afford access to distant markets while warning of the workplace and related risks incurred by cosmopolitan concerns that lose touch with their roots. With time out to deprecate economic nationalism, Kanter goes on to cite a number of multinationals great and small as exemplars of global competitiveness. Cases in point range from Colgate- Palmolive, Gillette, and Hewlett-Packard through Tech Ridge (a sometime machine shop that has made the most of its status as a Polaroid supplier). The author also sets great store by location, in particular urban areas that embody her touchstone ``three C'sthe key global assets of concepts, competence, and connections.'' As paradigmatic territory, she singles out Boston (a hub of knowledge-based industries), Greenville and Spartanburg, S.C. (hometowns of uncommonly skilled production workers), and Miami (a commercial/cultural crossroads). At the close, Kanter provides a series of recommendations that could give cities and resident corporations a so-called collaborative advantage in capitalizing on the global marketplace's many opportunities. Coherent if run-of-the-mill counsel from a don who could learn a thing or two from the sophisticated perspectives in Kenichi Ohmae's The End of the Nation State (p. 691). (First serial to Harvard Business Review; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81129-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A series of acute essays on the strange pseudoscience of predicting the future. Sherden, himself a consultant to companies like AT&T, here exposes the art of prediction as a skill not far removed from the (usually) smaller knack of the lucky guess. His targets begin with the relatively straightforward (weather forecasting) and move on to the globally devious (economics). Where cloudy skies are concerned, as he reminds us, forecasters are rarely trustworthy; to announce that ``the weather tomorrow will be like the weather today'' is statistically more accurate than even Al Roker's most carefully considered opinion. With economic forecasting, prediction seems much less reliable. A 1985 study by the Economist reported that sanitation workers actually tied for first place with heads of multinational firms as diviners of England's economic growth. Where economic forecasters are concerned, though they generate about $100 billion a year in consulting fees, Sherden compares their techniques to those of an ancient tribe worshiping the bull and the deer. He asserts that the efficacy of the forecasters hasn't improved, though some of their technology has. (Kodak and IBM, he notes, have dissolved their in-house economics departments; Microsoft shuns economists altogether.) But Sherden saves his best salvos for trend-predicters like Faith Popcorn, who charges $20,000 for a year's subscription to her monthly newsletter. He analyzes her most famous prophecy, regarding yuppie ``cocooning,'' and concludes that it simply didn't happen: From 1989 to 1994, restaurants saw a 25 percent increase in revenues, movie ticket sales rose 20 percent, and vacationing increased by 21 percent, contradicting the notion that Americans stayed home. He finishes off with a strongly worded discussion of false prophecies—from Manifest Destiny to the Nazi myth of the Aryan master race—that have cost nations human lives. Valuable support for anyone who instinctively rejects Nostradamus.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-18178-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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