The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), reveals new Oxfam analysis published today ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers. The findings show that, a decade later, the super-rich continue to exploit offshore systems to evade taxes and conceal assets, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated international action to tax extreme wealth and end the use of tax havens.
Oxfam estimates that $3.55 trillion in untaxed wealth was stashed offshore in tax havens and unreported accounts in 2024. This sum exceeds the GDP of France and is more than twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries.
The richest 0.1 percent holds approximately 80 percent of all untaxed offshore wealth, or around $2.84 trillion. Within this tiny group, the ultra-wealthiest 0.01 percent holds roughly half ($1.77 trillion).
0.1% still equates to 8.1m people; instead, if we we’re to focus focus on the Top 1%, of the Top 1% of the Top 1% - that is only ~8,100 people.
Holding their feet to the fire, and getting them to co tribute their fair share - despite their dragon’s hoard of wealth - would quickly bring those below them with less wealth in line.
e.g. Make an example out of Elon Musk, and the Ellison’s would quickly fall in line.
If it’s off the books, why dont the people holding it just take the bag and run?
They won’t give you more to hold onto and can afford a bigger military.
I’m talking about the individualm rob them like they rob us
Lmao, so this is fully excluding the official “net worth”. Just a handful of trillions here and there
Laws are for little people.
Wonder if there’s a way to force all outstanding Treasury notes outside of the country to need to return back to treasury for renewal or otherwise be written off at invalid debt.
If you write off Treasury notes we have to either accept that MMT is real and that we can print money when needed.
Or we’d need to destroy an equal amount of money to the treasury note.
Or if MMT isn’t accurate (unlikely) then we’d see inflation as the government would effectively be unsecuring it’s debts.
Not while the people running the USA are the same people who hide their immense wealth overseas.
Given the last Panama paper and similar leaks it’s much broader than USA :(
It’s a global class issue.
When Ukraine ousted their previous dictator, the Planet Money podcast had a piece on how the Ukrainian presidential palace had been effectively looted, and traced the absurdly long chain of shell companies that kept the actual owner obscured.
Also, the Vox/Netflix documentary series “Explained” had a genuinely good episode about billionaires. One of the things they brought up was that oligarchs store a lot of money in US real estate, like super-expensive NY condos.
Oh yeah, I just mean academically. We would need to be on a much different anti oligarchy footing to actually implement. But in the meantime, I like to noodle out systems and mechanisms.
Let’s say we eventually get to a renewed trust buster energy like we used the last time we broke up the corporate giants long ago.
Is there anything we could realistically do even with full control of the government, or is that money basically propping up the entire interconnected world economy?
The problem is that most of these assets are digitally held. What we need is an anonymous type attack against these accounts, similar in style to what they did in Mr. Robot.
Make it near impossible for the government to claw the money back.
I dunno I think the problem is the billionaires hoarding the money not the government trying to claw some of the money back, but that’s just me.
