Let us respect the colonialist plunderers of old. At least they had to risk "cannibals" and malaria. Today's plundering colonialists risk bad sushi and paper cuts in hotel lobbies in Switzerland and Singapore.
Reading Tom Wright's and Bradley Hope's Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood and the World engendered in me the same nausea and disgust I felt after reading The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein. Every dollar extracted from the poorer nations of the world is a dollar taken away from development efforts. And while Wright's and Hope's narrative takes advantage of the extravagence of Jho Low, the central character, to maintain the reader's interest, it matters not if the people who extract the money spend it on birthday parties, yachts and jewelry or actual productive business enterprises. It's all theft from the world's poor.
The looting of 1MDB is the subject of Billion Dollar Whale. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak oversaw the creation and management of 1MDB, a sovereign national fund, and, through cronies and bankers, pilfered millions (tens, hundreds?) of USD.
The best passage in the book is towards the end, on p. 371:
It contrasts somewhat with the pass that the authors on p. 229 provide to the bankers and accountants who facilitated and handsomely profited from this plunder:
Western financial institutions, from Goldman to auditors and private banks, had unwittingly helped Low get away with it, impoverishing Malaysia. (emphasis added)
When people talk about corruption, it makes actions like these seem like accidents. Liberals say thing like, "They took advantage of loopholes." and "Regulation must be strengthened." Radicals ask: what if the whole financial system is designed to continuously prevent capital accumulation for development in the Global South?
P.S. 2023-11-27 - Another important lesson from this colonialst plundering is the centrality of military force in international finance. Can you image what the United States government would do if confidence artists stole money from powerful people in the United States and used it to buy assets in militarily weak countries? The United States would demand transfer of assets and punitive reparations under threat of economic sanctions and military attack. Some libertarian-types imagine capitalism without government coercion. That is clearly a fantasy, as, at the end of the day, capitalists rely on military and police to protect their capital.
