The modern “treasure islands”

We 21st-century humans are accustomed to living in a world where economists dictate the rules, and markets and finance often shape government policies, while bank accounts and earnings define social hierarchies and, to some extent, our individuality. Money plays a crucial role and is often considered a yardstick by which to measure our actions. Just think how often we evaluate whether or not it's worth undertaking a task based on the promised remuneration. Contemporary man is therefore primarily "homo oeconomicus"—that is, a being who identifies with economics—and as such, he struggles even to imagine that in other eras, humans might have acted according to general criteria different from those of today, identified according to scales of values foreign to our time. He also struggles to imagine that there could be rules other than those of today's monetary and financial economy to manage the world. And this despite the fact that today's economic rules are often based on inequality, too often on the exploitation of the weakest, and on outright illegality.

Canadian journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian's book Where Is the Money Hiding? (Il Saggiatore, 2025, pp. 336, also available as an ebook) guides us to discover how the powerful have transformed the planet into a constellation of legal exceptions that defy every principle of justice and citizenship. Their goal: to accumulate ever more money, hiding it from tax authorities and government regulations, thus preventing this wealth from benefiting communities in the form of taxation.

To tell this alternative and concrete reality, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has decided to follow the routes of capital along the legal and illegal corridors that protect it from any control: from private Swiss banks to free ports that hide billions in works of art, from special economic zones that support entire GDPs to flags of convenience that free the maritime industry from all responsibility, up to new extraterrestrial utopias – subject to their own tax regimes – such as the space kingdom of Asgardia, a micronation orbiting the Earth and totally free from the control of terrestrial states. From numbered account to numbered account, Abrahamian thus reveals with disturbing clarity how this hidden and opaque empire has now become the very scaffolding that supports global capitalism, dotted with extraterritorial enclaves, concession cities, and offshore prisons where sovereignty is bought and sold: a collection of anonymous agents operating solely for personal profit, causing economic inequality, exploitation of the weakest, erosion of social rights, environmental devastation, and a crisis of democracy everywhere. In short, a disturbing investigation that redraws the map of the world as we know it through the story of the empire hidden among numbered accounts and tax havens.

Where is the Money Hiding? exposes this universe to us, revealing its details and intricacies, forcing us to confront questions we can no longer afford to ignore: to what extent can we tolerate a world where the rules apply only to those without the power to change them? How much longer can we tolerate money bending the rules and altering the very fabric of our democracies?