Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.
The offshore financial system centered around the City of London and British-linked tax havens has systematically extracted wealth from resource-rich but economically struggling nations. One may say that the system works as a globalist shadow banking network that profits from countries like Iran, Venezuela, African and Latin American states.
Half of the world’s offshore wealth sits in these British-linked secrecy jurisdictions. While Britain lost its military empire, it kept a big part of its financial empire. The globalist offshore system doesn’t discriminate by nationality or legality. It launders corporate profits, dictators’ oil revenues, multinational companies and terror funds alike.
“To put it provocatively, a second British empire is at the very core of global financial markets today,” says Ronen Palan, professor of International Political Economy at City University London, in an interview.
This offshore “casino” moves trillions of dollars annually, arguably supporting corrupt regimes and criminal networks by laundering money and profiting from the resulting chaos. With the City of London – the British empire’s financial weapon – as its hub, global money is manipulated and flows through tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, argues Mike Steger at Promethean Action.
Following the decline of the British Empire, the City of London reinvented itself as the core of a vast offshore network, largely controlling global finance through tax havens. The City of London used its old banking ties to build this global money system. It created the Euro-dollar market in the 1950s, which let banks hold U.S. dollars outside the United States. By so doing, local rules and taxes were avoided.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who leads the Treasury’s Operation Economic Fury, aims precisely at dismantling this system of offshore shadow banks, crypto, tax havens and shell companies. This approach attacks, for example, the financial lifeblood of regimes like Iran and Iran’s elite who launder oil money through shell companies owning luxury U.K. properties and so on. The U.S. is also threatening London’s control over maritime trade insurance, now challenged by the U.S. Development Finance Corporation replacing Lloyd’s, as Bessant explained earlier this year.
The Euromarket is the financial market post Bretton Woods, in which banking institutions and corporations borrow and lend money denominated in foreign currencies, conducted outside the geographical boundaries of their respective issuing nations.
“The Euromarket was essentially an informal agreement between the Bank of England and the commercial banks in the City of London that any transaction through London between two non-residents and in a foreign currency – at the time, mainly dollars – would not be subject to British regulations,” professor Palan, co-author of “Tax Havens: How Globalisation Really Works” explains. “The agreement seems to have yielded an unintended consequence: Such transactions were ‘deemed’ by the Bank not to be taking place in London. This liberated them from the regulatory regime not only of the U.K., but also of any other country. This was the origin of ‘offshore.’ Effectively, it created a new market. …
“The data tends to treat British jurisdictions like Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands as entirely separate, independent territories. They are not: They are part of the British state. And if you add them all together, you find that roughly one-third of all international deposits and investments are going through these jurisdictions, which are remnants of the British Empire. If you add ex-colonies whose independence was relatively recent, like Singapore, then you reach a figure of 40%. This compared to roughly 10% going through the U.S.”
Continues Palan: “The City of London is the core of a whole network of other financial centers which are linked to it, particularly places like Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and also Switzerland and Luxemburg. … In many cases financial transactions are being decided and agreed upon in London, but are being registered for various reasons (mainly tax-related) in, say, the Cayman Islands. As a result, the Cayman Islands appears statistically as the fourth largest financial center in the world, about the size of Frankfurt and much larger than Tokyo. But it’s only a paper center: Most of the activities attributed to it in fact take place in London. … It’s a great coup for the British state that the Cayman Islands are presented in the data as independent states.”
The Euromarket tax haven engine has effectively been a “global piracy system” that facilitates the current wealth transfer from the middle and lower classes to the top billionaire elites. The current U.S. administration under President Trump works to return the power and wealth to nation states, which now challenges the globalist billionaires’ City of London financial system.
