Harvard University Press
Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent
Key Metrics
- Brooke Harrington
- Harvard University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780674743809
- 8.3 X 5.6 X 1.4 inches
- 1.3 pounds
- Business & Economics > Finance - Wealth Management
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
How do the one percent hold on to their wealth? And how do they keep getting richer, despite financial crises and the myriad of taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance? Capital without Borders takes a novel approach to these questions by looking at professionals who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world's richest people: wealth managers. Brooke Harrington spent nearly eight years studying this little-known group--including two years training to become a wealth manager herself. She then followed the money to the eighteen most popular tax havens in the world, interviewing practitioners to understand how they helped their high-net-worth clients avoid taxes, creditors, and disgruntled heirs--all while staying just within the letter of the law.
Capital without Borders reveals how wealth managers use offshore banks, shell corporations, and trusts to shield billions in private wealth not only from taxation but from all manner of legal obligations. And it shows how practitioners justify their work, despite evidence that it erodes government authority and contributes to global inequality.
Harrington's research offers the first glimpse into the tactics and mentality of a secretive profession that controls astonishingly large flows of capital around the world. Based on sixty-five practitioner interviews--conducted in the traditional financial centers of Europe and the Americas as well as the up-and-coming tax havens of Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific--Capital without Borders gives voice for the first time to an elite that has worked quietly and unobtrusively to enrich the one percent.
Author Bio
Brooke Harrington is a sociology professor at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Pop Finance and Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.
Who creates change in markets and other financial institutions? My research for the past 15 years has investigated this question in a variety of empirical domains. I am an economic and organizational sociologist by training, with an empirical focus on finance, taxation and the professionals who specialize in those domains. My latest book for Harvard University Press concerns an elite occupational group within finance and its impact on international law and stratification. Previously, my research examined the effects of diversity and decision-making processes on the performance of investment groups.
I'm interested in how things get done--what social actors actually do in their daily lives--and how that aggregates to the macro-level of financial markets, culture and political institutions. My work intersects with the literatures of political economy, anthropology, social psychology and behavioral finance.
Research Interests
Economic sociology: financial markets and offshore banking /Sociology of stratification: wealth and taxation in connection to inequality /Sociology of the professions: elite and transnational professionals /Political sociology: states and the legal-financial ecosystem of tax havens /Organizational sociology: family firms, groups and diversity
Education
B.A. Stanford University
M.A. Harvard University
Ph. D. Harvard University
Source: Dartmouth College and brookeharrington.com
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