Often, when I hear folks saying that the rich and super rich are job creators, I ask myself: Exaclty to how much of world economics do you actually pay heed? If profits are not invested into foreign ventures they are hidden in foreign tax havens.

“These estimates reveal a staggering failure,” says John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network. “Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people.

“This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich.”

In total, 10 million individuals around the world hold assets offshore, according to Henry’s analysis; but almost half of the minimum estimate of $21tn – $9.8tn – is owned by just 92,000 people. And that does not include the non-financial assets – art, yachts, mansions in Kensington – that many of the world’s movers and shakers like to use as homes for their immense riches.

This is how the wealthy hoard their excess funds while taking advantage of the society in which they live: rather than investing in the nation that has given them the field in which to seize opportunities, they hoard their monies and in effect starve the economic system that generated their original field of profit. This is precisely the CRIPPLING of the “invisible hand” to which Adam Smith refers in The Wealth of Nations.

via Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, new research reveals | Business | The Observer.