....I'm seeing an analogue to the FBI vs Apple stand-off on i-phone decoding..........offshore financial centres don't actually physically hold any money per se...they just act as a layer of "encryption" on financial structures that lock out govt. scrutiny & leave them relying on nothing more than exhortation & appeals to co-operation to those whose entire business model relies on doing no such thing...
...this story must also be relevant to the current discussion about these events....
OECD unveils global push to end tax havens and loopholes
The OECD has spent two years working on a plan to "end the golden era of tax avoidance" and address base erosion and profit shifting,
...fair warning : this is an admittedly very broad brush & speculative train of thought but one wonders if we might be able to use these analogies to theorise some sort of emergent conflict - an unseemly struggle for the steering-wheel - between what we might term Realists - or those "voter-facing" governmental ruling elements firmly grounded in national polities & consequently more exposed to the pressures building up from below in the face of increasingly obvious panopoly of policy disasters : "austerity",unconventional monetary policy, ZIRP, NIRP, wars etc vs the Fundamentalists ideologically driven ( or sufficiently well remunerated ) to the protection über alles of corporate interests, corporate secrecy, bank bail outs / ins, destruction of "barriers", destruction of the western welfare model, "free-trade" & all the other aspects of the general globalist agenda....
...to state matters more simply I am seeing an irreconcillable conflict or contradiction between the revenue-generating / profit-maximising interests of the large corporate "business model" vs the revenue-generating function of the "government model" that might be approaching some form of cathartic crisis wether by accident or design ....
I would argue that in particular the Trump phenomenon ( & potential movement ? ) & the reactions to it of his opponents within the GOP & its opinionsphere let alone the general MSM may be seen as further evidence of this emergent ideological fissure & consequent destabilisation within establishment circles which has an internecine dimension to it that sets it apart from the more conventional idea of poliitcal insurgency from "outside" or "below" or from oppositional figures such as Sanders...
in the face of current intractable spending deficits leading to an inevitable, eventual setting-in of austerity-fatigue amongst already rebellious electorates & ever-more desperate & intellectually incoherent doubling down on failed nostrums then one can surmise that the timing was finally deemed right for a possible game-changer, a strategic coup such as a massive raid on the bloated off-shore piggy-banks ..
I'm struggling to incorporate the other elephant in the room of geo-politcal risk & issues of "security" into this rough model but on the basis that somewhere, somehow "something's gotta give" on the 35 yr neo-liberal hegemony I am currently envisaging a peeling away of these "Realist" elements into some form of political re-alignment or shifting onto common political ground with the ideological "anti-system" challengers....
...the most obvious point of commonality upon which such a re-alignment & new form of political consensus might emerge could be around attempted halting & reversal of the hollowing out & destruction of the real economy, the middle class, welfare & broader public goods under the guise of "free-trade agreements"....
