GLOBAL WEALTH REGISTER

“ . . . [Gabriel] Zucman unveils his principal proposal: an automatic, fully global register, so that every government in the world can know where money is kept, and who is trying to escape national taxes. Under his proposal, the register would record ‘who owns all the financial securities in circulation, stocks, bonds, and shares of mutual funds throughout the world.’ If rich people in the United States or Germany are depositing their money into Swiss banks, the Swiss authorities would have to inform American and German officials of the deposits. Zucman emphasizes that all this should be done automatically, so as to make special inquiries or evidence of suspicion unnecessary. With the register, tax authorities could tell, essentially immediately, if their citizens are using tax havens. Zucman notes that a global register of this kind could have other benefits, helping to combat the financing of terrorism, bribery, and money laundering; public and private corruption might be added to this list. He notes too (and here he will immediately lose some readers) that such a register could facilitate the imposition of a global wealth tax, of the sort proposed, very controversially, by Thomas Piketty.

“To avoid the charge of utopianism, Zucman emphasizes that there is a clear international movement in the direction he favors.”

Sunstein, Cass R, ‘Parking the Big Money,’ in The New York Review, January 14, 2016, pp: 37-38, a review of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, by Gabriel Zucman, University of Chicago Press, 2015.