right after 9/11 would have been the perfect moment to clean all the offshore center off the table - they would not have said a peep for fear of provoking the beserk hyperpower bent on beating the shit out of anyone in its way. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
If I try to bribe someone with 2000 square miles of African savannah instead of a big pile of cash, the edges of the transaction would still be booked even without a standard link between them. In the case of land, deeds would be registered.
You could only bribe people by buying things and loaning them permanently. This would work, up to a point, but it's much more precarious and public than anything we have today.
But let's not get caught up in finding all the comparisons with our current models that 'prove' why transparency couldn't work. That is the easy bit. You can't be me, I'm taken
But I work in a business that involves accumulative what-if brainstorming that only stops when everyone is quite clear that we have gone too far. On the road to madness, however, the process usually throws out some useful ideas that could not be reached any other way.
Sorry if I appeared to be attacking.... You can't be me, I'm taken
was just trying to tease more detail out of you. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
and how do you stop these microstates from running their banking systems? when their biggest asset is secrecy?
France has an escort carrier, I believe?
I would argue that breaking open tax cheat enabling countries is one of the very, very few justifiable uses of plain old gunboat diplomacy.
But even without that, one could simply outlaw all transactions going to or from such places and/or places that do not have similar transparency laws. 'Course, that'd require the transparent system to be self-sufficient (and then some) so it could effectively break off all financial contact with the noncompliant countries, so gunboat diplomacy might be easier.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
If, for instance, a government were to DOS - say - the Cayman Islands' internet grid, do you really think the public would object? If a government sabotaged their phone lines? If a government "accidentally" jammed their radios and satellite uplinks?
History doesn't suggest that the public will mind at all. Of course, I'd wish that we had a public that did mind. But then again, if we had that, we probably wouldn't have a big problem with tax havens in the first place.
