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This chapter presents another case study illustrating lower common denominator (LCD) outcome. Offshore finance is financial activity conducted outside the beneficiaries' national jurisdiction, usually in order to take advantage of less stringent regulations and the better rates this allows. The raison d'être of offshore finance is regulatory laxity. The incentives generally involve lax process regulations on the ‘production’ of financial services. Offshore finance allows firms to both circumvent and discourage restrictive national regulations. The chapter chronicles the flight to offshore financial centres from 1957 to 1988. It presents research on British banks, the Bank of England's support, and on American banks and government support, which illuminate how this system emerged. It discusses the benefits to offshore governments, and some recent moves to regulate money laundering through the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

The chapter summarizes observations made in the preceding chapters, and complements them from a geographical perspective, putting developments in the eight countries and eleven financial centres covered in the book in a global context. It starts by looking at the elite of the financial sector, comparing the world’s top centres of investment banking and asset management. Next, it broadens its focus by reviewing trends and patterns of employment in the financial and business services sector as a whole. The following section offers a glimpse of offshore finance and its development since the crisis. In addition, it provides an overview and comparison of developments in fintech and their potential impact on the global map of financial centres. The concluding section considers new geographical ways of conceptualizing relationships among financial centres, financial and business services, and offshore finance, and ends with suggestions for future research.

Chapter 9 traces a history of bubbles and financial scandals from the Dutch tulip mania of the seventeenth century to frauds associated with European colonization of the Americas to financial misdeeds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dirty finance is everywhere. Sometimes it is the source of the funds: the world’s most reputable banks have handled funds from highly disreputable sources. In other cases, clean wealth goes through dirty handling. Offshore finance shelters the great family fortunes, at the edge of legality. High frequency trading blurs the line between quick wits and market manipulation. Cartels of traders enrich themselves at the expense of clients. The rating agencies rate complex securities as sound with minimal investigation. In the Libor scandal, the biggest banks conspired to mislead the world about inter-bank lending. A description of the instruments, transactions, and the mechanisms of manipulation and fraud is provided.

Corruption is an international undertaking. A global cast of enablers, including oil-rich players from Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, Caribbean letterbox companies, banks in Switzerland and Singapore, American real estate agents, and the giant investment bank Goldman Sachs, helped an ambitious young Malaysian businessman capture and spend over $4 billion in just a few years. Most oil boom corruption cases followed roughly the same playbook: spirit away illicit funds via offshore shell companies and bank accounts and then sink them into foreign property, businesses, luxury goods, and public relations campaigns. Through these channels, corrupt money and its destabilizing influence spread around the world.

Earth exceeds globalizing capitalism, whose raggedy edges are characterized by a complex dialectic. While such edges are enrolled in its expansion, they consistently exceed its logic (challenging its globalization), unpredictably transforming globalizing capitalism and more-than-capitalist processes. Karl Polanyi’s fictitious commodities, people, Earth, and finance, are such raggedy edges. People and Earth instantiate distinct processes from those of commodity production. These can be enrolled in globalizing capitalism through accumulation by dispossession and the commodification of nature and culture. Yet, with globalizing capitalism failing to realize its promise, they also undermine and challenge it through the agencies of civil society and the more-than-human world. Financialization facilitates and disrupts globalizing capitalism in other ways, including post-Bretton Woods financial crises, reflecting its emergence as the ultimate, virtual, unlimited commodity. All three tend to reinforce the unequalizing implications of uneven, asymmetric connectivities.