There was a time when I posted articles every Saturday on the rich and powerful mostly as revealed through the eyes of Jamie Johnson who frequently wrote for Vanity Fair. But, alas, when the Occupy movement in the US took off in 2011 with their protests against the "One Percent", Johnson's column was dropped from this publication.
Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, has made two excellent films (Born Rich and The One Percent) about the über-rich whom he knows intimately. The rich have always tried to keep a low profile for obvious reasons, and Jamie suffered a lot of criticism for exposing aspects of their lives that they don't want ordinary mortals to know about.
In this piece we learn about where today's rich (and powerful) like to keep their money away from meddlesome ordinary people and their strange laws that prohibit capitalist methods of stealing and tax evasion: it is the City of London, a semi-private corporation that rules over a section in the center of greater London (see map). This oasis of capitalism has a rich history dating back some 800 years, yet few ordinary Americans know about it. This article will fill you in on many of the details.
...to understand why so much of the world’s money goes to London in the first place, you need to go back hundreds of years, to the emergence of what must be the most peculiar, the oldest, the least understood, and perhaps one of the most important institutions in the menagerie of global finance: the City of London Corporation. It is the local authority for “the Square Mile,” the pocket of prime financial real estate centered on the Bank of England and located about three miles to the east of Knightsbridge, along the Thames River. But the corporation is also much more, its identity embedded in—and slightly apart from—the British nation-state. The corporation has its own constitution, “rooted in the ancient rights and privileges enjoyed by citizens before the Norman Conquest, in 1066,” and its own lord mayor of London—not to be confused with the mayor of London, who runs the Greater London metropolis, with its eight million inhabitants.
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The City Corporation and closely linked think tanks issue streams of publications explaining why finance should be less tethered by taxes and regulation. The corporation also has its own official lobbyist, with the delightfully medieval-sounding name of The Remembrancer (currently one Paul Double), lodged permanently in Britain’s Parliament. Local elections in the City are unlike any other in Britain: multi-national corporations vote alongside and vastly outnumber the tiny borough’s 7,400 human residents.
Over the centuries the City has thrived, thanks to a simple advantage: it has had money to lend when governments or monarchs needed it.