Secret Money

Walter, Ingo. The Secret Money Market: Inside the Dark World of Tax Evasion, Financial Fraud, Insider Trading, Money Laundering, and Capital Flight. 2nd edition. New York: HarperBusiness, 1990. 377 pages.
This scholarly work is replete with numerous examples of slime that floated to the surface from the underground world of high-finance and illicit wheeling-dealing, which is why we put it in NameBase. It is well- written, tightly-argued, and very informative, alternating between statistics on the dimensions of the secret money market, descriptions of escapades that ended in prosecutions, discussions of how accounts are opened in places like the Cayman Islands, and matter-of-fact observations about the effectiveness of SEC monitoring and regulation.

One suspects, however, that if this book sells well off campus it's because readers want to know how NOT to get caught. Off-shore banking, tax shelters, insider trading, and the arcane world of Swiss financial privacy are treated in rich detail, while more difficult scams such as fraud and organized crime within the savings and loan industry are not treated at all. But then Ingo Walter, professor of business administration, probably finds it difficult to keep on top of the high-capital crime curve from his office at New York University.
ISBN 0-88730-489-3