The Golden Age of Capitalism, in pictures

Copied from the Treasure Islands blog:

In Treasure Islands, in my chapter about John Maynard Keynes, I compare two periods since the Second World War: first, the quarter-century that began soon after the War, in which capital flows and trading across boarders were quite tightly constrained and top marginal tax rates very, very high in many countries; and second, the period after that, when there was financial liberalisation, rampant tax-cutting, and a veritable global explosion of tax havenry and financial secrecy.

United for a Fair Economy in the U.S. have now provided a useful picture of what those two periods look like at least from a U.S. perspective (though the Golden Age of Capitalism was widespread, globally.) Take a look.

There are few things as damning of economic policies as this picture, in my view. It was carefully fact-checked, elsewhere, and withstood the scrutiny.

Now before anyone gets onto the "correlation isn't causation" hobby horse, note in Treasure Islands that I explicitly avoid making this claim that one caused the other. But the less drastic conclusions one can draw, along with other indicators (such as research summarised by Martin Wolf as "financial liberalisation and financial crises go together like a horse and carriage") are nevertheless extraordinarily powerful.

And tax havens are front and centre of the financial liberalisation story.

And that's not to mention the direct links between inequality - very significantly a story of offshore - and the latest global financial crisis.

Or all this, for that matter.