Moneyland review: How the world’s ultra-rich get away with it
What do Japanese surrogate babies, luxurious London condos and the tiny Caribbean island of St Kitts have in common? For Oliver Bullough, they’re all part of the terrifying and vertigo-inducing ways the world’s ultra-rich – the denizens of what he dubs ‘Moneyland’ – protect themselves and their money.
In Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back, Bullough – a journalist whose past life as a Russia-based reporter shines through in this globe-trotting tale of grand corruption, its enablers and its victims – draws together a gut-wrenching collection of tales from this strange overworld.
Combining his own reporting with showing how many seemingly-disconnected stories from recent decades, he draws a line joining glamorous Instagram accounts, bumper divorce settlements and the events like the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, showing how they are all relate to this same strange world of the super-rich.
Bullough digs deep into the tastes and tactics of this group, with its membership dominated by Putin-backed plutocrats, Chinese billionaires and third-world kleptocrats gleefully robbing the poor to pay the rich As he unpacks their usually garish and decadent predilections – for sweeping penthouses, toilets with TVs or wedding dresses that cost more than houses – he looks at the way such wealth is often the product of national embezzlement that is symbiotically linked to corruption and deprivation.
Though he dwells on the extremities of this super-class’s spending, Bullough saves much of his wrath – the book is underpinned by a speechless, incredulous anger – for the systems, and people, that have let the Moneylanders get away with it. Using the corrupt, Bond-villain plutocrat Goldfinger as a model, he begins by explaining how gold-linked monetary policy introduced in the wake of the Second World War created the conditions for global capital to enable corruption on never-before-seen scales.
New York CIty is a popular destination for kleptocrats’ money (Source: Getty)
Quickly, you realise the nefarious Goldfinger is comparatively twee: Bullough describes how opportunistic lawyers and politicians sold out whole countries in order to enable the loophole-jumping ambitions of the rapacious mega-rich. The incredible amounts of money many Moneylanders have accrued necessitates theft on a staggering scale, and Bullough shows how the flipside of gated super-developments in Miami and palatial tower blocks in London and New York is Ukrainian children being robbed of cancer treatment, and money being pulled away from some of the world’s poorest communities.
It is this which underpins the book’s focus and premise: looking at how the rich and powerful can pick and choose from a smorgasbord of different legal systems and national conventions to enjoy minimum taxation and maximum legal impunity: Kittisian passports, Swiss bank accounts, English libel lawyers and American trust funds.
The enablers – the lawyers and accountants who advise the Moneylanders, and the politicians who clear a path for them – are drawn under close scrutiny: justifying their actions as being merely a support service, while in doing so enabling a system shown to cause huge damage. Throughout this, the City of London is a frequently-villainous presence, its occupants often among those willing to support some deeply-unsavoury characters if it means a regular payday.
It’s hard to read Moneyland without feeling giddy at how power and untouchable those it focuses on have become. Bullough’s book does not deal extensively in suggestions on how it can be battled: he points to the importance of international collaboration, and powerfully explores the two-faced nature of America’s role in global corruption – at once a fierce fighter for justice, and unwilling to look to its own failings. That’s not to say the book is without hope, but when confronted with such an immense and systemic wrong, it’s no wonder we feel drawn, as Bullough often seems to be, to stare on in disgusted disbelief.