For they shall inherit...

September 8, 2018 5:52 AM

The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world. The true story of how the City of London invented offshore banking – and set the rich free.
posted by adamvasco (5 comments total)

Nice oil tanker metaphor. Since oil seems to have replaced gold in many ways.
posted by eustatic at 6:32 AM on September 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

And the other real Goldfinger.
posted by haemanu at 7:07 AM on September 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

They don't call it black gold for nothing.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:39 AM on September 8, 2018

The villain Auric Goldfinger’s cunning scheme is to own pawnbrokers all over Britain, buy up gold jewellery and trinkets from ordinary Brits in need of a bit of cash, then melt them down into plates, attach the plates to his Rolls-Royce, drive them to Switzerland, reprocess them and fly them to India. 

Free movement of capital has been such a dominant doctrine for all of my life that it takes concentration for me to see why it was a crime, and why perhaps it should be a crime again.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:48 AM on September 8, 2018 [5 favorites]

Just on a personal level I remember having a conversation with a relative about going to Europe from the UK in the 60s/70s and the limitations of taking spending money in... nowadays you can just go to a cash point when you get there
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:01 AM on September 9, 2018 [1 favorite]