The Hidden Globe
How Wealth Hacks the World
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Riverhead Books - 2024
pp 288
If you missed “The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World” when it first came out last year, delay no longer. This tour de force by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian provides a passport into on alternative reality world that is navigated regularly by the globe’s wealthiest individuals and corporations – a place where borders provide no barrier, where investments are tax free and regulations are lax so that the rich can keep doing what they do best, which is to amass money for themselves, scruple-free. And much of this happens out of view of the general public.
Abrahamian grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, home to the World Trade Organization, several prominent United Nations agencies, the Aga Khan Foundation, and hundreds of other multinational organizations and corporations – “a place defined by a certain placelessness,” the author writes. In Geneva, she says, it is not always clear who is making the rules. And, if there are rules, not everybody has to follow them. There’s diplomatic immunity, and duty-free shopping. There are banks holding the ill-gotten gains of deposed dictators and tax evaders in secret accounts. Likewise, Geneva is home to one of the largest of the world’s “freeports” – an uber-secure warehouse where the ultra-rich can hide away their private collections of art, gems, wine, and furs.
Abrahamian calls this a “spectral economy.”
“The city is full of conduits…” she writes, “for a capitalism that is run remotely…. a portal to other worlds.”
It enables the ultra-rich to stay ultra-rich. It allows the most vociferously xenophobic, border-hugging, tariff-taunting nationalists to have their cake and eat it too – talking a tough anti-globalist game, while this global network of “wealth hacks” quietly provides them with concessions, carve-outs, and – let’s call a spade a spade – tools for tax evasion.
From the Arctic Circle to Australia, from the ocean’s depths to outer space, “The Hidden Globe” explores the far-reaching impacts these schemes have on trade imbalances, carbon emissions, labor practices, refugees and immigrants, and a quality of life across the globe that seesaws severely between grotesque consumption and abject poverty.
Abrahamian points out that even her own home country’s much-vaunted political neutrality is much less about protecting individual asylum seekers than it is a strategy to create a safe space for capitalist booty.
As arcane as this topic may seem at times, Abrahamian serves as a sharp-witted but down-to-earth tour guide, opening our eyes to different protections and sets of rules that most certainly were not crafted to serve you or me or anyone of our ilk. Instead, they were designed to favor the heavily-endowed few – and to exclude, exploit or punish those who inconveniently get in the way.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest.
Barbara McMichael
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is based in the Pacific Northwest and writes about books and culture. She writes a syndicated weekly book review column called “The Bookmonger” that focuses on Northwest books and authors. Her PR for People® Book Review is written exclusively for The Connector.