Here’s an excerpt:
Banking privacy is dead. Completely, totally dead. Murdered, really. The US government is the assailant, and FATCA is the murder weapon.
We’ve talked about this a few times before– FATCA is the heinously insidiously piece of legislation that the Honorable Barrack Hussein Obama passed into law in 2010 as part of the “Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act”.
There were no hiring incentives, and there was no restoration of employment. But any vestiges of banking privacy were destroyed.
Has anyone read anything else about this Simon Black of the Sovereign Man website? Does Sovereign Man have anything to do with those “Sovereign Citizens” that got such bad press recently?
I bet the IRS (and all the statists in Congress who think they own every American in the world) are very happy that the public’s first association with the word “sovereign” — or for that matter, “renunciation” — are those “sovereign citizen” tax protestors who keep coming up with dubious manoeuvres that don’t work in order to get out of paying taxes in a country they actually live in.
Anyway, Simon Black’s not one of those. He’s just an advisor who promotes offshore financial services. Here’s his blog where Business Insider, Zero Hedge, and a few other big-name blogs pick up his writings from. He’s published some good articles on FATCA recently (e.g. here and here). There’s a bunch of guys in this space with similar company names (Doug Casey/International Man, Mark Nestmann/Sovereign Society, Bob Bauman/Sovereign Investor, Jeff Berwick/Dollar Vigilante, etc.). Simon generally strikes me as one of the more reputable ones. The only thing is he never stops “talking his book” and trying to get people to pay up to subscribe to his private newsletter, but that’s the same as all the others. And of course he keeps “talking the talk” about internationalisation, but remains based in the US and holding a US passport =)
Ah yes, I’ve been to the website before and also got the impression that he was mostly trying to hawk a bunch of products. Thanks for your comment!
What I hate — and this is not exclusively the US — is that IF you want to do everything 100% above board, you have to jump through many more hoops. I’ve experienced that in 3-4 countries I’ve lived in. The G20 need to sit down and have a talk about this one.