Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Treasure Islands summary
Nicholas Shaxson
Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World
16 mins
Brief summary
Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson exposes the murky world of tax havens and how they operate, highlighting the damaging effects they have on the global economy and society as a whole.
Table of Contents
Treasure Islands
Summary of 7 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 7
Tax havens are jurisdictions for secrecy.
As you probably know, tax havens have low tax rates – for some. You might’ve heard stories of corrupt dictators or mafia bosses keeping money in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. What’s the purpose of this?
It’s quite simple: secrecy. A secrecy jurisdiction enables people or entities to escape certain laws and regulations by relocating their funds to hidden places.
Tax havens don’t cooperate with authorities from other countries. You can’t tax someone without knowing how much money they have. This is why your bank notifies the authorities when money is put into your account.
Tax havens don’t provide this information to authorities, however. They only provide information if the authorities already know the specifics of your offshore banking, and even then there’s a process to go through.
Even if a tax haven does share information with law enforcement authorities, they still provide services to protect their clients.
Many tax havens have flee causes, for example. That means that if Interpol comes looking for your money, your assets will automatically be moved to another place, like an account in a different tax haven.
Ultimately, tax havens are able to provide almost perfect secrecy. Another way they do this is through the use of trusts.
In a trust, the person who pays the money is the owner, and they have to designate a certain goal for their fund. There’s also a professional manager called the trustee.
The goal of a trust is that the money should be paid back to the owner or their relatives after some amount of time. The trustee is often a professional lawyer who manages hundreds of trusts at once.
Tax authorities can’t know who the owner is – they only know the registered trustee. Lawyers can’t tell anyone who their beneficiaries are because that would be a breach of confidentiality. The real information stays hidden.
Want to see all full key ideas from Treasure Islands?
Key ideas in Treasure Islands
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
What is Treasure Islands about?
Treasure Islands offers insight into one of the darkest parts of the financial world: tax havens. It explains how wealthy people and corporations are able to avoid paying taxes by relocating their assets offshore. Tax havens are highly damaging to all but the tiny percentage of people who can afford to use them, and they contribute to the growing gap between rich and poor.
Best quote from Treasure Islands
More than half of world trade passes, at least on paper, through tax havens.
—Nicholas Shaxson
Who should read Treasure Islands?
- Anyone interested in tax havens
- Anyone interested in economics
- Anyone interested in global power dynamics
Categories with Treasure Islands
Book summaries like Treasure Islands
People ❤️ Blinkist
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
People also liked these summaries
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
28 Million
Downloads on all platforms
10+ years
Experience igniting personal growth