A Convenient Nonsense

Economist Dr Andy Sloan, Acting Director of Strategy for Guernsey Finance, on the latest and unfair attacks directed at the British offshore finance centres.

A rather convenient but dangerous nonsense has developed in the post global financial crisis era of secular stagnation. Its general gist is that if Western governments would only eradicate tax avoidance perpetrated by offshore finance centres, fiscal deficits would be a thing of the past.

It's up there with Bernie Saunders' election message 'the business model of Wall Street is fraud' as a populist truism that's abject nonsense. It then manifested this week as naïf claims in the Houses of Parliament that the British offshore finance centres were involved in tax avoidance on an industrial scale.