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client recommendation,” said Scriven. “The client will say, ‘I’m happy, and I’d like to introduce you to my friend’—and you build it up like that. You get some seriously interesting people . . . someone who goes abroad as a rigger twenty years ago for Shell may now be in charge of the company’s West Africa operations.” It seems reasonable, too, to imagine how client recommendation might one day deliver Nigeria’s oil minister and his friends, say, or a powerful Indian businessman, or a South African casino operator. The network grows, following old colonial links. “We gather deposits from wealthy folk all around the world, and the bulk of those deposits are sent to London,” Scriven continued. “The banks consolidate their balances every day, and surplus funds won’t sit here—they either go to another bank or on and through to the City. If I have money to spare, I pass it to the father. Great dollops of money go into London from here.” In the second quarter of 2009, the UK received net financing of $332.5 billion just from its three crown dependencies.27

Jersey Finance promotional literature makes a similar point. “Jersey,” it says, “represents an extension of the City of London.”28

As the City of London’s Caribbean havens and its crown dependencies were developing, something similar was happening in Asia. Hong Kong, which the U.S. economist Milton Friedman called the world’s greatest experiment in laissez-faire capitalism, was to be the new Asian offshore jewel, a tax haven gateway to China and the subregion. Britain remained the guiding hand, while giving financiers free rein. The colony’s financial secretary, Sir John Cowperthwaite, installed in 1961, had such stridently antigovernment views that he curtailed the publication of official statistics on the grounds that it would help the civil servants. When China introduced its “Open Door” policy of market reforms in 1978, opening up to foreign investment and export industries, Hong Kong was made: It was, as the financial crimes fighter Jack Blum remembered, “an ‘anything goes, no-regulation’ world.” When Britain handed it back in 1997 China kept it as a “special administrative zone” with the same ambiguous offshore status. Hong Kong’s Basic Law states that it shall “enjoy a high degree of autonomy” from China in all matters except foreign relations and defense. The close resemblance here with the British offshore arrangements is no coincidence. Chinese elites wanted their own offshore center, complete with political control and judicial separation. “Corporations doing business in China set up Hong Kong companies with secret shareholdings,” Blum continued. “Today Hong Kong is where most of the corruption in China is accomplished.” When the G20 countries sought to approve a tax haven blacklist at a summit meeting in April 2009, Chinese premier Hu Jintao fought intransigently with Barack Obama to get Hong Kong and Macau, another notorious Asian offshore hub, excluded. He got them relegated to a footnote.

Despite Chinese control, the City of London remains deeply engaged with Hong Kong, as do Wall Street firms—often through their London offices. Hong Kong remains a smallish offshore player: Its nonresident deposits, at $149 billion in 2007, were just one-eleventh the size of the Cayman Islands’ $1.7 trillion. One day many years hence, however, it may grow large enough to become a key financial tool in Chinese global imperial strategies.29

Singapore set up its financial center in 1968 and soon began to attract hot money.30 Andy Xie, Morgan Stanley’s star Asia economist, described how it had turned out, in an internal email in 2006. “Singapore’s success came mainly from being the money-laundering centre for corrupt Indonesian businessmen and government officials,” he said. “To sustain its economy, Singapore is building casinos to attract corruption money from China.”31 Xie and two colleagues reportedly had to resign after the email became public.

By the 1980s, the main elements of the City of London’s offshore networks were largely in place and being used extensively by Wall