Moneyland Quotes

“For the US to be like Russia today,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of members of Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshall Service, Border Patrol, state and local police officers, the Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court justices, US district court judges, support of the varied organized crime families, the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, at least half of the banks in the US, and the New York Stock Exchange.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“As with almost all the troubling aspects of Moneyland, this near-impossibility of retrieving assets once they have vanished offshore is driven by the basic rule that money can travel where it wishes, while law enforcement stops at a country’s borders.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back

“But there were some islands that didn’t fit easily into this pattern, above all Anguilla, which was adjacent to the Dutch/French island of Sint Maarten/St. Martin, but annoyingly distant from anywhere British.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“In the early 1980s, the key political rivalry in St. Kitts and Nevis was between the Labour Party and the People’s Action Movement (PAM).”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“The only reference to it came from a meeting on November 16, 1983, when the ministers agreed that a passport should cost each potential investor $50,000 plus a “substantial fee.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“Where there are loopholes, there is Moneyland, and there are professionals making sure that the world’s richest people have access to privileges and possibilities denied to everyone else. In some ways, the citizenships and residencies being touted at Henley’s conference act like a Moneyland passport, but the passport-for-sale industry did not begin like this.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“Essentially, it’s: we’re going to find a way to screw legitimate creditors out of collecting a legitimate debt; that’s the business these people are in, but they call it something different, and they throw a lot of money at it and they’re able to propagate it that way.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“Commentators from all sides of politics have expressed concerns about the effect of inequality on the fabric of society in the United States, where the share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent rose from a quarter to two-fifths between 1990 and 2012. But if you think that’s bad, look what’s happened to the world as a whole: in just the decade after 2000, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population increased its wealth from one-third of everything to a half. The top three and a half dozen people now own as much as the bottom three and a half billion. How is democracy possible with that kind of gulf in wealth and power between citizens?”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

“All money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back

“In the British case, some £133 billion had entered the economy since the mid-1970s, without anyone noticing, with £96 billion of that in the last decade. (The rate is accelerating, with current inflows totalling around a billion pounds a month.)”
― Oliver Bullough, Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back