Tax-Free and the Offshore Imaginary

Abstract

The concept of offshore, and the imaginary that sustains it, is the dream of colonial discovery and individual freedom gained through the commandeering of a geographic space that exists in contradistinction to historic sovereignties with their burdensome governmental systems. The romanticization of offshore spaces is also very practical, however, in that the offshore space is a geographic fantasy turned into a profit-making reality of resource exploitation and financial deregulation by radical capitalists who see the vast potential to expand personal profit. This Article is about how geographies of select financial institutions are imagined and constructed as off-grid, offsite, and offshore, at least in relation to the landscape of conventional institutions, and how these geographic imaginaries of high-wealth banking construct complicated archipelagos of both privilege and poverty. The Article provides a brief history of offshore financial centers, then charts the development of “offshore onshore” in certain American states. The Article concludes with a discussion of the ways in which offshoring, as both a strategy for asset management and a legal fantasy, compounds problems of legal exceptionalism, financial deregulation, asset secrecy, and, ultimately, wealth inequality.

Keywords: offshore, tax, high-wealth families, trust law, financial secrecy, colonialism