For over forty years in more than sixty countries, Raymond Baker has witnessed the free-market system operating illicitly and corruptly, with devastating consequences. In Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Baker takes readers on a fascinating journey through the global free-market system and reveals how dirty money, poverty, and inequality are inextricably intertwined. Readers will discover how small illicit transactions lead to massive illegalities and how staggering global income disparities are worsened by the illegalities that permeate international capitalism. Drawing on his experiences, Baker shows how Western banks and businesses use secret transactions and ignore laws while handling some $1 trillion in illicit proceeds each year. He also illustrates how businesspeople, criminals, and kleptocrats perfect the same techniques to shift funds and how these tactics negatively affect individuals, institutions, and countries.
Capitalism's Achilles Heel
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Editorial Reviews
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"...Challenging the view that financial scandal and tax dodging are isolated cases in an otherwise robust system, Capitalism's Achilles Heel shows how these 'negative externalities', as economists call them, have generated a spirit of lawlessness that threatens the integrity of the market system and the finance industry as a whole..." (The London Review of Books, 6th October 2005)
"...Baker is an ethical capitalist - at least - more so than most - his concern is the incredible rapacity and corruption of modern capitalism - a must-read for those on the left...." (The Morning Star, 28th September 2005)
“…excellent book…well-researched…” (Financial Times, 10th August 2005)
From the Inside Flap
Throughout his career, Raymond Baker—a tough-as-nails businessman turned scholar —has been thoroughly committed to capitalism. He has seen it all, and now he offers careful analysis and gripping examples that illustrate the serious problems besetting the global free-market system. With this book, Baker provides a fascinating insider's look at the way criminals, terrorists, and businesspeople move dirty money around the world, impoverishing billions and corrupting capitalism's ideals of fair play. In this highly readable account, he links banking, commerce, law, economics, and philosophy with passionate advocacy of steps that must be taken to renew capitalism's mandate for the spread of global prosperity.
For over forty years in more than sixty countries, Baker has witnessed the free-market system operating illicitly and corruptly, with devastating consequences for scores of fragile nations. Now, in Capitalism's Achilles Heel, Baker—the internationally respected authority on money laundering, corruption, and development issues—takes you on a fascinating journey that winds its way across the global free-market system and reveals how dirty money, poverty, and inequality are inextricably intertwined.
You'll discover how small illicit transactions lead to massive illegalities used by drug kingpins, racketeers, terrorist masterminds, and multinational corporations. You'll learn how staggering global income disparities are worsened by the illegalities that have come to permeate international capitalism. And, you'll see how distorted philosophical underpinnings appear to justify flaws in the practice of capitalism.
Drawing on his experiences throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, Baker shows how Western banks and businesses use secret transactions and ignore laws while handling some $1 trillion in illicit proceeds each year. He also illustrates how businesspeople, criminals, and kleptocrats perfect the same techniques to shift funds—through transfer pricing, false documentation, fake corporations, tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions, and other tricks of the trade—and how these tactics negatively affect individuals, institutions, and countries.
Can anything be done? For capitalism to succeed on a global scale, we must fight rampant lawlessness, reduce inequality, and recast the free market's supporting structures around principles of global justice. Capitalism's Achilles Heel provides a place for us to start.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
By J. Cohen
Format:Hardcover
Terrorism, drug and human trafficking, environmental degredation, income inequality, poverty, political repression...no matter what your angle or area of concern in international affairs, there is money behind every challenge facing civilization. Dictators need resources to pay off their political power bases pases and support their lavish lifestyles; terrorists need resources to acquire weapons and stealthily transfer wealth to aid allies across borders; criminals, such as poachers, drug smugglers and human traffickers need some way to stash their ill-gotten proceeds; wealthy corporations and individuals have to hide their money somewhere to avoid paying taxes and skewing the economic system further in their favor. No matter what problem you're looking at, money needs to go in, and money needs to come out, and somebody has to hide it.
Raymond Baker is under no illusions. He's no pie-in-the-sky socialist still refusing to accept that capitalism has enriched and people everywhere it has been introduced. At the same time, he's not slavishly devoted to the ideology that says open markets are the cure for all ills, that the best the solution for every problem is simply to let the market "do its thing." He recognizes that the key to having a safe, fair and free capitalist system is to re-establish fair play and the rule of law necessary to maintain a truly free market.
This ground-breaking foray into capitalism's dark underbelly is grounded in Baker's rich use of economics, philosophy, practicality, personal experience and careful research. Incorporating case studies, economic research, the proceeds of international criminal investigations and his own experience and an international businessman, Raymond Baker shows how dirty money is at the center of so many of the world's problems--not just a peripheral side-effect of the spread of wealth--and why it is so important to ge this worsening problem under control.
Quite simply a must-read for anyone trying to better understand international affairs!
Raymond Baker is under no illusions. He's no pie-in-the-sky socialist still refusing to accept that capitalism has enriched and people everywhere it has been introduced. At the same time, he's not slavishly devoted to the ideology that says open markets are the cure for all ills, that the best the solution for every problem is simply to let the market "do its thing." He recognizes that the key to having a safe, fair and free capitalist system is to re-establish fair play and the rule of law necessary to maintain a truly free market.
This ground-breaking foray into capitalism's dark underbelly is grounded in Baker's rich use of economics, philosophy, practicality, personal experience and careful research. Incorporating case studies, economic research, the proceeds of international criminal investigations and his own experience and an international businessman, Raymond Baker shows how dirty money is at the center of so many of the world's problems--not just a peripheral side-effect of the spread of wealth--and why it is so important to ge this worsening problem under control.
Quite simply a must-read for anyone trying to better understand international affairs!
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Raymond W. Baker has written a provocative and thoroughly readable book on one of the darker, less-examined, sides of globalization's financial and commerical dimensions. The author brings formidable intellectual assets to this undertaking. A well travelled and savvy international businessman, Baker demonstrates an enviable grasp of business and, more technically, accounting principles, and how they are frequently corrupted for short term financial gain. Indeed, with the obvious exception of George Soros, today's dominant writers on globalization are almost uniformly drawn from the academic and journalistic worlds. Nothing wrong with that, to be sure. But as Baker's pain stakingly researched case studies of financial and business criminality illustrate, direct, hands on expertise in this realm cannot help but make a stronger case for combatting those practices. The other compelling virtue of "Capitalism's Achilles Heel," in my view, derives from the sweep of the authors key indictment of the present international legal regime: the weakness, if not conscious laxity, of industrial country effort in combatting these practices. This book is not a comfortable read. For those who are tired of the current lamentable state of affairs, it is an absolutely necessary one.
John Starrels
John Starrels
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book distorts the corruption problem in developing countries by lumping it in with tax evasion. Little is said about government officials helping themselves to the public treasury in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The book only touches that issue to blame Western banks for accepting their deposits. Yet U.S. banks are subject to harsh penalties for accepting ill-gotten funds. Criminal as well as civil penalties are imposed on bankers who don't get the point, which means imprisonment and/or fines from personal assets. I hoped this book would propose practical solutions for improving this enforcement. Instead, it effuses on fear and greed, pointing the finger only where the market for anti-capitalism literature can bear. (I have no affiliation with banks, just grasping for solutions.)
For example, the author equates transfer pricing with tax evasion. Since every product is made in more than one country these days, there is always room for discussion about where income was earned and thus where income tax is owed. Developing countries often have tax rates in excess of 70%. Their officials frequently do not expect these rates to be paid-they use them to extort bribes with impunity. In countries where prices are negotiable, people are not shocked when government fees and regulations are negotiable. While this impoverishes the public treasury, local managers adapt (albeit stifled). U.S. managers cannot play this game because they are scrutinized under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. They cannot circumvent 70% tax rates by paying bribes, so they use transfer pricing to create some sort of system integrity in an environment of overwhelming litigation risk.
Valuable and well-written sections of the book relate to traditional forms of "dirty money"-criminal and terrorist proceeds. The author has a very worthwhile goal--to staunch the flow of dirty money by unifying efforts to fight all its various forms. My only disappointment was the pursuit of this goal by "rounding up the usual suspects."
For example, the author equates transfer pricing with tax evasion. Since every product is made in more than one country these days, there is always room for discussion about where income was earned and thus where income tax is owed. Developing countries often have tax rates in excess of 70%. Their officials frequently do not expect these rates to be paid-they use them to extort bribes with impunity. In countries where prices are negotiable, people are not shocked when government fees and regulations are negotiable. While this impoverishes the public treasury, local managers adapt (albeit stifled). U.S. managers cannot play this game because they are scrutinized under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. They cannot circumvent 70% tax rates by paying bribes, so they use transfer pricing to create some sort of system integrity in an environment of overwhelming litigation risk.
Valuable and well-written sections of the book relate to traditional forms of "dirty money"-criminal and terrorist proceeds. The author has a very worthwhile goal--to staunch the flow of dirty money by unifying efforts to fight all its various forms. My only disappointment was the pursuit of this goal by "rounding up the usual suspects."
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Helpful
Thought this might be good for a certain number of points, but was so dry that I just have not gotten through it. But perhaps one day I will be able to.
Published 6 days ago by TravelMan
1.0 out of 5 stars
Capitalism's Achilles Heel? "Freedom", says the author
Free flow of capital is going to, by definition, be amoral. Some capital will flow to orphanages, some to drug dealers. Read more
Published on September 10, 2010 by C. BURNS
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very unique look at failures of the global capital system
I greatly enjoyed this piece!
First, to address some of the book's lower reviews, I think if you are looking at this piece from the lens of someone interested in the... Read more
First, to address some of the book's lower reviews, I think if you are looking at this piece from the lens of someone interested in the... Read more
Published on December 6, 2009 by 1000Books
5.0 out of 5 stars
required reading
Working in the financial sector in emerging markets, this was a fascinating shot across the bows. It should be required reading for anyone potentially involved in the effects of... Read more
Published on January 12, 2007 by M. Chambers
2.0 out of 5 stars
a naive look at the "shadow economy"
After graduating from Harvard's Business School in the 60s, Raymond Baker spent some time in Africa, and is clearly unhappy with the continent's progress, or perhaps more... Read more
Published on November 13, 2006 by lector avidus
5.0 out of 5 stars
Baker shows how we have lost our way
Baker shows us how "maximizing profit" is a failed philosophy. Only by including Justice in our dealings with one another can we expect to create a decent, life-giving society. Read more
Published on March 2, 2006 by Boxcar
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful account of crime and capital
This is a fascinating and deeply researched book by a businessman with experience across the world. Baker sums up, "Dirty money causes disaster for millions and deprivation for... Read more
Published on March 1, 2006 by William Podmore
5.0 out of 5 stars
Finding the real Adam Smith
I found this to be one of the few books able to produce a cogent and specific critique of the problems of globalization, one that wasn't just leftist jargon at high decibels. Read more
Published on November 17, 2005 by John C. Landon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential and intelligent reading
Anyone interested in helping poor people in poor countries, or the state of global finance, or issues of justice will find this book required reading. Read more
Published on October 6, 2005 by Jo Marie Griesgraber
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
