How to hide it: inside the secret world of wealth managers | Brooke Harrington | Business | The Guardian: "As world wealth has grown to record levels in recent years – to an estimated $241 trillion – inequality has also grown, with 0.7% of the global population owning 41% of the assets. Wealth managers are estimated to direct the flows of up to $21tn in private wealth, resulting in about $200bn in lost tax revenues globally each year. In effect, these professionals detach assets from the states that wish to tax and regulate them, creating a form of capital that is, like its owners, transnational and hypermobile. Doing so involves creating not just asset-holding and tax-avoidance structures but a new body of transnational institutions, which are expanding outside of any democratic process of checks and balances. In this way, the rise of the super-rich and the wealth management industry is creating an elite who are increasingly ungoverned and ungovernable.
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