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Rogue Economics (2008)

by Loretta Napoleoni(Favorite Author)

3.64 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1583228241 (ISBN13: 9781583228241)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Seven Stories Press

review 1: The book covers a diverse range of topics within underground economics and is thought-provoking. However, the writer often seems to go off on far-left wing rants as if she couldn't help herself. I'm center-left and found some of it irritating- like how the Marshall plan was laid out to economically enslave, and so on. Not that she doesn't have a point but the argument runs thin and the anti-Americanism gets tiresome. Even though I like some of the topics she was covering; the book's politics and prejudges became too much. I gave up on it little more than half way.
review 2: This book touched on a wide range of subjects, so it'd be most useful as:-An introduction to the rogue economy and how it's interweaved with legal goods and services.-A refresher for r... moreeaders who've already read about these issues.Similar books that tackle individual issues in greater detail:-McMafia by Mischa Glenny, on organised crime-Knockoff by Tim Philips, on counterfeit goods-The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, on global poverty-The World Food Problem by Howard Leathers, on aid efficacy-Garbageland by Elizabeth Royte-Safe by Martha Bear, on security-Deluxe by Dana Thomas, on luxury goods------------------------------------------------Notes I took from Rogue Econs:-Today slavery is commonly believed to be the product of foreign powers’ exploitation of poor countries; in fact, the opposite turns out to be true: most victims are enslaved and traded by their own compatriots. -Rogue products penetrate and corrupt traditional economies. When we buy a wedding ring produced with gold mined by Congolese children working for ruthless warlords, smuggled to Uganda, and sold with forged documents of origin by crooked trading companies, we establish a commercial link with the sinister underworld of Africa’s illegal and criminal economy.-The infamous Arizona Market, in Northwestern Serbia, is well known among international pimps. It resembles a nineteenth-century American gold-rush town, hence the name. Tucked behind a stretch of road nicknamed Arizona Highway, which runs near the Croatian border, the market has been nicknamed the Walmart of Serbia because it was constructed with the support of American troops at the end of the Balkan civil war.-Israel represents one of the largest importers of Slavic prostitutes and various sources estimate that one million Israelis visit a prostitute every month…Demand is particularly high among Haredim, the most conservative Orthodox Jews, many of whom are regular clients of brothels.-The glamorizing of prostitution facilitates the luring of Slavic women into the sex industry. Hollywood blockbusters, such as Risky Business and Pretty Woman, project an entirely fictional image of prostitution.-In 2006, the estimated annual value of global prostitution equalled $52 billion.-In countries such as the Netherlands, where prostitution has been legalized for decades, the degree of exploitation is lower: there are fewer pimps, prostitutes pay taxes, receive medical and social security benefits, and have police protection.-A river of dollars flows from America to China, creating a dollar-denominated surplus in the Chinese trade balance. To offset the trade surplus, China runs a capital account deficit with America, i.e. it buys US treasury bonds and increases dollar-denominated reserves…Ironically, China, a communist country, has been financing both the trade and the budget deficit of the US to avoid revaluing its currency, and action that would make its products less competitive in the US. America has welcomed such a strategy to keep consumers and voters happy and the economy afloat.-When housing prices rise at a phenomenal pace and demand is strong, banks can turn around repossessed properties quickly and even make a profit. Often, bank managers alert developers and buyers, who are their clients, of a forthcoming foreclosure so that these can approach the owner and purchase the property before it is auctioned off by the bank.-Fictional environments expand in times of harshness because economic degradation erodes civil society and alters people’s perception of their own surroundings.-It is the increase in salaries, not the return on investment, that is enriching globalization’s superrich. What makes their wealth soar are not sudden jumps of the share prices held in their portfolios, but rising fees received for their work. -Globalisation expands the market into which a talented individual can apply his or her skills, while technology permits companies to grow ever larger.-After 1989, the modern ‘leisure class’ moved to London to take advantage of an old Victorian fiscal law. The law was designed to protect the profits of British plantation owners across the empire, from the West Indies to Africa and India. They could maintain British residency and move their domicile, i.e. their fiscal residency, abroad where they had their business. Therefore they were taxed only on the income they brought back to England while the rest was tax free. The identical principle is today applied to new billionaires residing in London. By moving to the UK, people can avoid taxation in their own country on billions of dollars. Only Americans cannot benefit from this law, because the US taxes its citizens on global income. -The move of hedge funds into the derivatives market is intimately linked with the globalisation of the world economy. In 2005 and 2006, for example, the economic rise of China created an unprecedented commodities boom. Once regarded by the US as a docile manufacturing colony, China is now the world’s largest consumer of steel, copper, and tin, and the second-largest importer of petroleum, helping to push prices to record levels. Against this background, hedge funds have speculated heavily in the commodity markets, pushing prices even higher.-Until 9/11, the bulk of the $1.5 trillion generated by the illegal, criminal, and terror economies was laundered in the US and in US dollars. Because 80% of this economy is washed clean in cash, money had to physically enter the US. The main entry came through offshore facilities and shell banks located in the West Indies. In Oct 2001, the US Congress approved the Patriot Act, legislation that greatly restricted civil liberties in America. Its financial section drastically reduced money laundering inside the US and in dollars. For example, US banks and register banks can no longer do business with offshore shell banks. In addition, the Patriot Act gave American monetary authorities the right to monitor dollar transactions throughout the world. Today, it is a criminal offence for a US bank or a US-registered foreign bank not to alert the authorities of suspicious transactions in dollars anywhere in the world.-Since it applied exclusively to the US, it did not curb terrorist financing, criminal activity, ad money laundering abroad. These dirty businesses simply shifted to Europe, where the newly unified European currency offered organisations already involved in money laundering unexpected opportunities for groth.-Data from the Guardia di Finanza show that from 2001 to 2004, money-laundering activity in Italy increased by 70%. -The lack of efficiency of the European money-laundering system is particularly apparent in the real-estate sector, because local land laws are not updated to anti-money laundering international standards. In addition, local land registers cannot communicate with each other across borders; therefore it is impossible to verify if somebody has bought properties in different jurisdictions.-The fall of the Berlin wall did not take the Bulgarian nomenklatura, the core members of the Communist Party, by surprise. In 1982, members of the Bulgarian elite began developing joint ventures with Bulgarian state enterprises and fictitious foreign firms located offshore. To fund these partnerships, they borrowed money from Bulgarian state banks, that was then moved offshore. Between 1987 and 1988, these fictitious joint ventures swallowed about $10 billion of Bulgarian state finances.-In 2004, when China’s voracious demand for steel exploded, manhole covers started to disappear all over the world. The first displacements were felt in Taiwan, the next were in other neighbourhoods, such as in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. More than 150 covers disappeared during on month in Chicago. Scotland’s ‘great drain robbery’ saw more than a hundred vanish in a few days. -In the spring of 2006, the French antitrust authority cited several cosmetics companies, including L’Oreal, Chanel, Christian Dior. YSL, Estee Lauder, and Clinique, for colluding in maintaining high prices to the detriment of consumers. The French authorities fined these companies a total of $64 million for breaking EU antitrust laws. The price-fixing tactic they used, called police pricing, involves the cartel’s imposing an identical high retail price in every shop that stocked its perfume. Discounts are fixed by the cartel, and if shops grant higher reductions, they cease to have access to products. -Italian authorities estimate that one in every two counterfeit products sold globally comes from China. -Paris is one of the European hubs of the Chinese bogus goods industry and hosts the largest number of Chinese illegal immigrants in the EU. -Often, criminal gangs, in partnership with Chinese manufacturers based in Europe. Lure the migrants to Europe. Chinese-based organisations supervise the transcontinental shipment of people, while locally based Chinese groups manage the transit points of the human merchandise to the countries of destination. Today, Moscow and Malta serve as the most popular transhipment points. -Sometimes, the entry to a European country is legal; European governments grant work permits to Chinese workers on the basis of employers’ legitimate requests. After a few weeks, however, these immigrants can be fired and forced to work, often for the same employer, in the black market. In other cases, they reach Europe with regular passports and tourist visas, which are confiscated by the traffickers at the border. Passports and visas are then sent back to China, so that it appears that the ‘tourists’ have returned home. Without regular documents, immigrants must work in the black market to survive.-In Europe the majority of illegal immigrants end up working in the $80 billion garment industry.-The Italian authorities have estimated that at least 34% of the vast wealth generated by Chinese enterprises in Italy is tax free and returns to China in cash by way of couriers.-Often, biopiracy goes unnoticed because it takes place through the complex system of patents. In 2004, the Dutch company Soil and Crop improvements patented teff, a cereal from Ethiopia, and all the derivatives of its flower. Teff is the main staple grain of 80 million Ethiopians. Cosmetics multinationals have skilfully registered many African enzymes, microorganisms, and fungi as their own new beauty products.-Patent holders across the world, such as the owner of the gene for Hepatitis C, continue to receive millions from research labs around the world.-According to the WHO, one in every ten pills is counterfeited and sold as the original. Fake medications generate $32 billion in profits and kill about half a million people every year. Most of the victims come from developing countries, where counterfeit medicines are regularly consumed. -According to the International Medical Products Anti-counterfeiting Taskforce, the proportion of fake medicine in the industrialised world is rising, but it only amounts to about 1%, compared with 70% in countries like Nigeria.-A tight cartel runs the international diamond industry to prevent diamonds from countries ruled by warlords, such as Sierra Leone, from entering the diamond market. The gold industry is totally unregulated and relies on trading companies scattered around the world.-DRC gold reserves are among the largest in the world, with most of the country’s mines located in eastern Congo. Miners in East Congo sell their gold to negociants, small traders who constantly mingle in the mines. The negociants bring the gold to Ituri, a major gold market controlled by Congolese war lords. From Ituri, a fleet of smugglers carry the gold to Uganda. -The cocoa we drink may come from the Ivory Coast, which supplies half the world market. Children and adolescents from even poorer neighbouring countries, such as Mali, trek all the way to cocoa plantations to earn a subsistence salary. Millions of people depend for their sustenance on this parasitic rogue economy. The alternative could impoverish them further, if it does not put them at risk of death. To eradicate the problem, one must also attack the root causes, a task that only local governments can accomplish.-An estimated 27 million people in the world are enslaved. They produce profits of around $31 billion a year. -Bananas are the single most profitable item sold by British supermarkets and the profits are split so: 45% to the supermarket, 18% to importers, 15.5% to the plantation company, and 2.5% to the workers.-Tesco and ASDA are owned by Walmart.Action Aid suggests that the impact of the banana price war fought in the UK since 2002 has halved hourly wages of plantation workers in Costa Rica, which supplies one out of every four bananas consumed in the UK and Ireland. Workers now earn 33p an hour and are under such pressure to produce that they cannot afford to take time off when planes spray pesticides on the crops.-From 2003 to 2005, Philip Morris’ total sales went from 40 to 70 billion cigarettes, thanks to the Eastern European and Asian market.-The Asian population is so much greater than the Western one that a 30% decline in cigarette consumption in the West can be offset by as little as a 2% increase in the Asian market. Japanese Tobacco International owns the rights to sell several brands of Western cigarettes outside the West, and is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. -In 2005, the Altria Group, a holding company based in NY, became the tenth most profitable corporation in America. It used to be called Philip Morris, a name that is still attached to two of its holdings, Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International. The company also own Kraft Foods.-Access to the secondary illegal market to the gold currency used in the gaming industry is easy. Legitimate auction sites, such as eBay, host 30 million annually in the trade for goods that exist only in synthetic worlds. -China is the single biggest market for online gaming. Estimates from the Chinese government set the number of video-game users at 24 million. About one in four Chinese Internet users is a player. The volume of the illegal business has grown so vast and the laundering techniques are so advanced that wholesalers find it impossible to verify the origin of the coins.-A code number is read by credit cards every time a transaction takes place. In restaurants it’s 321, at petrol stations it’s 496. Online casinos use 777. E-currencies were created to avoid this traceability. The most popular e-currencies are Paypal, Neteller and E-Gold. Unlike Paypal, E-Gold allows account holders to maintain their anonymity. E-Gold is a digital gold currency issued by e-gold Ltd, a company incorporated in Nevis, Lesser Antilles, an offshore facility. It allows people to send specified weights of gold to other e-gold accounts. Only the ownership changes while the gold in the treasury grade vault stays put.-Online gambling is illegal in many American states, yet people can do it because the servers are offshore. Central America and the Caribbean Islands, places such as Costa Rica, Panama, St. Kitts & Nevis, are popular places for online casinos. Taxes are low, as little as $50,000 a year, plus a small percentage of the annual revenues.-According to an analyst for Internet Pornography Statistics, yearly internet porn revenue in 2005 was $57 billion. -According to a study commissioned by the MPA, movie piracy cost Hollywood studios $8 billion in 2006: $3.1 billion were due to bootlegging, $1.82 to illegal copying, and $2.99 to Internet piracy. The leading countries for movie piracy are China, Russia, Britain, France, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Poland, and Mexico. The movie industry loses a potential 93% of its market in China, 62% in Thailand, 51% in Taiwan, and 29% in India.-Linden dollars have an official exchange rate of 250 to the US dollar. At the end of 2006, the GDP of Second Life reached around $60 million, with an annual growth rate of 15%. Members use credit cards and electronic currencies to purchase Linden dollars. Linden Lab’s currency trader, LindeX, charges a fee for every transaction, while independet traders make money on the spread between buy and sell. Speculation in Linden dollars is very popular among traders. -One third of all fish consumed in the UK is poached from the Baltic and North Seas. Gangs of Russian Mafiosi supply half the cod purchased as lawful in traditional British fish markets, such as Hull and Grimsby. Russian-owned trawlers operating from the northern port of Muransk, ignoring strict quotas on fishing of cod, red fish and halibut. From this port, an estimated 100,000 tons of cod is poached from the North Sea, above annual 48000-ton quota established by the UK and Norway. The fleets avoid tracking by renting or leasing vessels for a very short time and reflagging them. Flag hopping confuses surveillance authorities. Even when they are caught, coast guards have trouble identifying the owners of vessels because they hide behind shell companies and offshore ventures.-The Pantagonian tooth fish and the bluefin tuna can sell for up to $10,000 and $15,000 per fish, respectively. -The international hub for rogue fishing is in Europe, specifically -Multinationals and governments often employ pirates to carry away dangerous waste. As much as 47% of European rubbish is toxic. According to the UN Environmental Programme, the annual production of e-waste ranges from 20 to 50 million tons. Recyclable refuse heads for India and China, while the non-recyclable refuse ends up in Africa. -Water pollutants include human hormones, such as estrogens released by women taking birth-control pills. -Rivers in the US and the UK contain high proportions of phthalates and nonylphenols, chemical that feminise fish. Male fish exposed to such effluent produce a protein called vitellogenin, usually present only in females.-One in three fish consumed worldwide is farmed. A farm generally has around 10 nets, each containing 15,000 and 80,000 fish each. Antibiotics, antifoulants, and sea-lice treatments are among the pollutants that escape into the sea. -Most farmed species, such as salmon and tuna, are carnivorous and consume many smaller fish. Production of a pound of salmon requires 5 pounds of oily fishes, such as sand eel, sardines, and herring. -Maras, or pandillas, originated from Southern California in the 1950s. they existed primarily to protect Hispanic immigrants from members of other ethnic gangs. -In the globalised world of football, hooligans use the game as a vehicle towards tribalism, and violence and victory dictate the way forward. -Islamic finance centres on the religious tenets of Islam and allows Muslims to stay compliant with sharia law. Riba, the charging of interest by moneylenders, is prohibited. Gharar, or speculation in any form, is condemned. Money is not supposed to be used a commodity in itself to create more money. Sukuks, or Islamic bonds, are linked to real investments. less

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