part of a cover of the book Treasure Islands with red photo filter

Treasure Islands: Uncovering offshore banking and tax havens

In his book Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson attempts to challenge the preconceptions people have on tax havens and portrays the reality of the offshore economy.

In his book Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson attempts to challenge preconceptions people have on tax havens (“bank secrecy is now dead, the OECD said it”; “it's not tax havens but high taxes that causes tax avoidance”) and portrays the reality of the offshore economy.

Shaxson shows that tax havens are not the matter of mafiosi and far-away islands; the biggest users of tax havens are banks themselves, and the biggest tax havens are actually the United States and Britain.

This new light shed on the offshore system allows him to demonstrate how tax havens are at the centre of our economy and may explain the economic crisis the world has been going through since the '70s.

To read more about tax havens, take a look at this article from Journalist's Resource, which gathers different academic reports and reflects on the evolution in scholarly approaches to tax havens.