Brittain-Catlin’s musings on the meaning of capital are often off the point and distracting, but Offshore ought to raise...
A glimpse inside the secretive world of offshore banking.
“I protect wealth from wives and spendthrift kids,” remarks one Canadian expatriate to the Cayman Islands to sometime BBC producer and debut author Brittain-Catlin. The sentiment holds, metaphorically, across the board—if, that is, one accepts that the internal-revenue services of the first world mean to soak those people who just happen to have done very well for themselves. The Caymans are something of an accidental trove; as Brittain-Catlin notes, in the mid-1960s the British crown colony was nearly bankrupt, for “there was no room in the modern world for an island that made rope and caught turtles and whose wetlands prevented any agriculture.” Yet today the islands, with a much-grown population, are the world’s fifth-largest banking center and hold assets of more than $700 billion, most from corporations and wealthy individuals who can enjoy both secrecy (the bankers would prefer to say “privacy”) and tax-free interest earnings. Brittain-Catlin traces the Caymans’ growth to U.S. economic policy in the Johnson and Nixon years, when the government attempted to keep control of the number of dollars exiting the country, and when Europeans hungry for the currency came to the nearby islands to acquire greenbacks. Now a state in which business and government are nearly one and the same, the Caymans and cousin money-laundering nations have proven highly useful to terrorists; the Saudi Arabian Bin Laden Corporation, source of the Al-Qaeda mastermind’s wealth, “is believed to operate through subsidiary holding companies in the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and Cayman.” The U.S. government, writes Brittain-Catlin, has done only a little to follow that money and stanch its flow, and “only when doing so suited its immediate objectives.” Nonetheless, even that little has caused some corporations to flee from Cayman to places that allow even more secrecy, such as “Hong Kong or Singapore, Bahamas or Bermuda.”
Brittain-Catlin’s musings on the meaning of capital are often off the point and distracting, but Offshore ought to raise hackles among those who wonder why the world belongs to the wealthy.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-25698-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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