Beeb stuffs $21tn into Olympic-sized swimming pools The BBC has agreebly calculated that the amount of wonga Brits have squirrelled away in offshore accounts would fill no less than 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The total in question is $21tn, or £13.5tn. Were this substantial wedge "denominated in $1 bills", it would occupy rather a lot of Olympic Park Aquatics Centres …
Re: why use dollar bills for a UK currency measure. Are fivers not good enough?
Because then the story doesn't sound as impressive (Not that I'm condoning it).
If they're just trying to make the number seem bigger, why not tell us how many olympic sized pools of 1p coins this could fill
Because calculating how many rectangular objects that will fit into a bigger rectangular is simple enough math, however calculating the number of circles you can pack into a rectangular object is a variation of Kepler's Sphere Packing Conjecture and the maths may a bit beyond your average jurno. . . . . and about 99.999999% of the worlds population
You are correct. The $21tn figure is the whole of the worlds monies that is stuffed "some place" to avoid taxes or questions.
My question is how reliable that figure is. If the funds are being secreted away in "totally secure and private" facilities then either someone spilled the beans or some economist is making a guesstimate that will only serve to give governments everywhere more reason to pry into my business/wallet.
"My question is how reliable that figure is"
Probably more than adequately accurate, looking at the Tax Justice Network's web site. Don't forget that the $21trn includes legitimate private wealth, criminal wealth, and legitimate corporate funds, that TJN consider to be "unjustly" avoiding tax. So potentially that's US corporations using Delaware to reduce tax liabilities, UK corporations with their captive insurance operations based in the Channel Islands, and any global corporation moving money to where corporation taxes are low. So Amazon and Google are big UK tax avoiders, using completely legitimate practices within the EU, and many US companies use Ireland to avoid paying higher mainland European tax rates.
Be warned before you visit www.taxjustice.net that it's pretty dreadful - very, very difficult to get a feel. Millions of links, lots of method, repetitive verbiage, but they've not made the real content easy to find or use. Indeed, they need a journalist and a technologist to help them out, in my humble opinion. Taking selected TJN snippets to assemble my own view, I guess that about half of the claimed $21trn is legitimately held by wealthy private individuals, one third is corporate funds, and the remaining one sixth is criminal wealth.
Rather than questioning the number, this fundamentally boils down to two simple questions:
"If it is legal, is it wrong?
And "If it is wrong, why is it legal?"
How can the world have offshore cash? Is it stored in Martian swimming pools deep underground (that's where all the water went)?
HSBC: "The solar system's local bank".
NatWest: "To save and invest, come to Venus."
RBS: "Make it so!"
Barclays: "We can manipulate Libor on Neptune, but we prefer Uranus."
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I love how certain programs on Discovery (and other related channels) compare things to Boeing 747s. "<x> weighs as much as <y> Boeing 747s". Which is an utterly meaningless comparison for 99.99% of viewers who have no concept of how much a 747 weighs. And then there is the lack of appropriate specifics. What are they comparing about the 747? Maximum take-off weight (MTOW)? Empty weight? etc
P.S. 95% of statistics are made up
Just noticed this example of Beeb measurement conversion:
"The council said in the 24 hours before the flood more than 190mm (19cms)of water fell on the Nant-y-Moch reservoir in Ponterwyd, near Aberystwyth, which resulted in some of it being released."
Presumably the conversion is for people who have trouble visualising the size of a millimetre.
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