"You're kidding!" ... "I must be, the Bahamas are islands."

September 12, 2024 1:08 AM

At that point, Groves was just walking a well-trodden path of exploitation and chicanery first blazed by Christopher Columbus, whose initial steps in the New World were taken on the island now known as Grand Bahama. Within two decades, Spanish explorers had killed or carried off the island’s native inhabitants, and for centuries afterward, Caribbean historians note, pirates made the Bahamas their base and became the de facto rulers. From then on, being a law-free zone intermittently boosted the economy of the Bahamas. from The American Con Man Who Pioneered Offshore Finance by Brooke Harrington [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

prominent advertisement at the beginning, apropos
posted by HearHere at 3:06 AM on September 12 [1 favorite]

By 2019, the Financial Times described the Bahamas as “the richest country in the Caribbean” in terms of GDP per capita, due largely to its offshore financial-services business, which by then made up an estimated 20 percent of its national economy. These figures represent an extraordinary transformation from the Bahamas of the mid-1940s, when local historians recorded widespread destitution and occasional death by starvation.

Yet the country’s Gini coefficient for household wealth—a measure of economic inequality—is among the highest in the world. Ironically, in a center of global finance, an estimated one in five Bahamians still lacks access to a bank account, and real wages are so low that the government occasionally institutes price controls to keep bread and eggs affordable.

That's not irony, that's just what wealth inequality does, as anybody who has ever played Monopoly should already understand.
posted by flabdablet at 3:36 AM on September 12 [4 favorites]

who has ever played Monopoly
[wiki:]
the landlord's game rebrand?
posted by HearHere at 3:54 AM on September 12 [1 favorite]

That's the one.
posted by flabdablet at 3:56 AM on September 12 [2 favorites]

Ok let me clear up some misconceptions that I figured out by reading the previous finance thread: these people in poverty are totally fine, because this system is doing the noble work of price discovery! This is very important stuff and there's absolutely no other way to do it.

Additionally, financiers are not getting filthy rich exploiting the labor of others for their own sake, far from it! That is merely an accidental side effect of the primary goal of mitigating risk.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:19 AM on September 12 [9 favorites]

Looks like perhaps the “ungated” link is malformed.
posted by mboszko at 5:06 AM on September 12 [2 favorites]

Mad props for the post title.
posted by ejs at 5:58 AM on September 12 [12 favorites]

For those in the future reading these comments, I think SaltySalticid's delicious snark about price discovery is a reference to this comment thread.

(Also, the post title is *chef's kiss*)
posted by AlSweigart at 6:38 AM on September 12 [5 favorites]

If you find this interesting, Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World might also be handy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:43 AM on September 12 [1 favorite]

Mad props for the post title.

between references to What the Gays Are Doing to the Soil and bitchin' camaros, the Dead Milkmen are getting their share of loving callbacks this week in MeFi
posted by ginger.beef at 6:58 AM on September 12 [3 favorites]

Reported this, but the ungated link is currently broken, I think because of an HTML formatting issue in the OP. This is the correct link, I think.
posted by limeonaire at 7:52 PM on September 12 [1 favorite]

Yes, that's the link, sorry about that.
posted by chavenet at 1:09 AM on September 13