How foreign investors launder their money in New York real estate

Want to know why housing costs are so crazy in New York? Here's one big reason.

A New York apartment.
(Image credit: iStock)

One of the signature features of the modern age is the bottomless greed of the global economic elite. The richest people in the world — business tycoons, political elites, and wealthy heirs — spend half their time attempting to rake in more cash, and the other half protecting what they already have from as much taxation as possible. The key tool in this latter process is the tax haven: using legal chicanery (and, rather frequently, straight-up fraud) to move income and wealth into jurisdictions where it will be subject to little or no tax.

Tax havens have been an obvious problem for decades. But they've gotten special attention from the publication of leaked corporate documents in the Panama Papers, and most recently, the Paradise Papers.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.