Offshore Financial Centers in Global Capital Flow

The article is dedicated to investigation of the place and role of offshore financial centers in financial globalization system, and of the reasons for using offshores in assets securitization mechanism. Numerous offshore and other preferential zones enabling to avoid the effective national and governmental tax regime are important attributes of global financial system and redistributive links of world financial flows. At present, around 70 countries and territories offer their offshore services for foreign capital, bank transactions, profitability from activities in financial markets proper. The global offshore business concentrates large amounts often having no relation to the country of origin, the so-called cosmopolitan capital (wandering). Although in the early 80's of the XXth century offshore companies were considered to control approximately 500 billion dollars, it was already in the early 90's that this amount doubled and was estimated as 1 trillion dollars. Today, from ⅓ to half of the world capital turnover goes through offshore business channels, and therefore, almost half of non-resident bank deposits are concentrated in world offshore centers. These are the world financial centers comprising international capital markets that provide for the accumulation and redistribution of world capital. From the process of reproduction (circulation of capital), the world financial centers plunge out the most homogeneous and mobile element — money, and freely manipulating with them, concentrate huge economic power in their hands. The role of world financial centers was also enhanced by the latest achievements in computer science, allowing execution of instant transactions and movement of huge amounts to any point of the world within the shortest possible time. The world financial centers consist not only of powerful banks and financial institutions operating on the international scene, but also have currency, stock and other exchanges as their integral parts concertedly working under increasingly unified rules. The world financial centers are establishing new criteria for economic activity, modifying its motivation and priorities. Basically, these changes are aimed at shortening the activities timing and advancing profitability over all other criteria. As a result, substantial portion of funds is directed not to production, but to purely financial transactions. The matter is not only that with significant financial resources available, the volume of competitive production facilities according to international standards is limited and often burdened with increased political risk. The financial sector itself is artificially creating particularly favorable conditions for itself, at the same time generating risks to be mitigated and securitized.