We’ve been hearing a lot of Americans bandying about the term, “City of London”, blaming it for all of the world’s woes. To those unfamiliar with this usage, it sounds like the capital city of the UK or the British people are being blamed for the world’s problems. That is not what is meant.
The City of London that’s being referred to is “The Square Mile” at the historic center of Greater London that has a unique political status, owing to its having been incorporated since Medieval Anglo-Saxon times and having managed to resist the Norman Conquest of 1066. William the Conqueror granted citizens of “the City” a charter in 1075 that remains in force to this day.
As the British Empire collapsed in the 1950s, financial institutions found that by claiming to operate within the tiny jurisdiction of the Corporation of the City of London, they could circumvent the regulation and taxation of the UK.
When American banks understood that the City allowed them to avoid US regulations, they were quick to move their international operations there and within half a century, it had become standard practice for large corporations to leverage and to outsource not just their financial assets but their operations, in order to skirt the laws and taxes of their home jurisdictions.
This City of London business model of offshoring capital, production and liability has since gutted, deindustrialized and suppressed the economic development of nations around the globe by also weaponizing Chinese slave labor and currency manipulation, making it impossible for other economies to compete.
Mid-century banks set up the Euromarket, where currencies from outside their countries of issue were held and traded and called “eurocurrencies”. The eurocurrency market developed into the major source of finance for international trade we know today, because of the ease of convertibility and the absence of domestic restrictions on trading.
In the 1960s, the City of London’s model was replicated in the last remaining territories of the Empire. Accountants and lawyers from London descended upon these British dependencies and cobbled together “secrecy jurisdictions”. Of the 14 overseas remnants of the British Empire, seven of them, including Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands are the biggest tax havens in the world today.
These secrecy jurisdictions engage in mass quantities of illegal activities, like drug money-laundering, terror financing and tax evasion but the Bank of England has determined that as long as UK capital isn’t transferred outside the Sterling Area, they don’t mind. They seek only to foster offshore centers with strong secrecy legislation in order to attract capital from across the globe. And last week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put them on blast.
These City of London secrecy jurisdictions create incentives for people in positions of power to be corrupt and have facilitated the looting of developing countries by their elites. In 2008, the debt of Sub-Saharan African nations stood at $177 billion dollars. Yet, the wealth these country’s elites had moved offshore between 1970 and 2008 was estimated at $944 billion, technically making Sub-Saharan Africa a net creditor to the rest of world, not a net debtor.
This lawlessness has inevitably attracted all of the unsavory elements that one could imagine, like the Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was eventually accused of opening accounts or laundering money for figures such as Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega and for criminal organizations, such as the Colombian Medellín drug cartel and for the terrorist, Abu Nidal.
Police and intelligence experts nicknamed BCCI the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International” for its penchant for catering to customers who dealt in arms, drugs, and hot money. The Central Intelligence Agency held several accounts at BCCI. According to a 1991 article in Time magazine, the National Security Council also had accounts at BCCI, which were used for a variety of covert operations, including transfers of money and weapons for Iran-Contra.
Scott Bessent’s Operation Economic Fury targets Iran’s financing networks, many of which are based in London. When countries complain to Britain about the activities run out of its offshore havens, Britain claims that these places are independent and that there is nothing it can do, that they don’t have the powers to intervene. When Scott Bessent had a meeting last month with the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, the two had a “fierce row”, according to the Financial Times.
Britain has long since been captured by the Globalist/Financialists, who use this system of secrecy jurisdictions to wage irregular warfare in the form of drugs, human trafficking and terrorism to control nations and peoples.
In Britain, the dominance of finance has hollowed-out British industry, increased inequality, inflated housing speculation and limited the government’s ability to fund public services.
Richard J Murphy describes the impacts of the City of London from the point of view of a Briton who is also a Professor of Accounting. He offers his proposals for how to prioritize citizens over financial elites and to regain control over finance. He proposes transparency, beneficial ownership registers, public reporting, sanctions on secrecy jurisdictions, and the abolition of corporate voting rights within the City, itself.