Thomas Piketty Quotes

Corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion are global problems, not just challenges for developing countries.

It isn't only rich countries that suffer from the effects of tax havens. Developing countries also lose billions of dollars in tax revenues due each year because wealthy individuals and some companies use tax havens to move assets and income offshore.

Reliable numbers about the amount of dirty money around the world are difficult to come by. But according to an estimate by the nonprofit Global Financial Integrity group, $1 trillion vanishes from the developing world's economies every year.

Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.

Those who willfully conceal assets overseas undermine the playing field for all taxpayers.

We should not allow wealthy people, including corporate criminals, to hide their assets and avoid paying their bills.

It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.

We know India is very focussed on black money; it is a very high-focus subject and we have been very careful to make sure the investments into India are legitimate. There is no 'round-tripping' or hot money or bad money being funnelled through Singapore.

I'm careful to pay every single penny on my taxes. I don't have any money offshore.

Collective European Union action could mean no hiding places for evaders, no safe haven for tax avoiders, and no treasure islands for money launderers.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.

There's something fundamentally grubby about the rich paying people to seek out cracks in the system to hide their money.

Before even getting to David Cameron's father here's a starting-point question about the Panama Papers: how is the desire to break the anonymity of Panama banking secrecy different from the FBI's interest in breaking Apple's encryption of the iPhone?

If we can rid the world of financial centres that thrive on lack of transparency, non-cooperation, and weak regulation, an important step towards a fairer and cleaner world economy will have been achieved.

We shouldn't be encouraging people to set up Cayman Island funds.

The two greatest priorities for my government are tackling tax evasion and corruption.

Changing much-cherished bank secrecy laws is worth the effort. Corruption, tax evasion, and the capture of natural resource revenues undermine the rule of law, weaken the social fabric, erode citizens' trust in institutions, fuel conflict and insecurity, and hamper job creation.

Those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

Massive tax avoidance. Billions and billions of dollars.

There will be huge scandals because there is too much money washing around …. And we don’t know who’s behind it.

The can’t collect legal taxes from illegal money.

As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.

The Indian economy has declined because of the peculiar Indian 'invention' of that perfidious financial derivative called Participatory Notes, or PNs, otherwise known as the crony/crooked facilitator for black-money-based portfolio investment. No other country would think of such a derivative.

Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.

Black money is a cancer in our economic system, not yet terminal or life-threatening.