the bold and the beautiful and the crminal

Here's a message for all the cities that are thuggishly attempting to criminalize System D street vending and hawking (yes, I mean you, Sao Paulo and Lagos, among many others): why not go after the real bad guys?

A new study has revealed that the global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide somewhere between $20 trillion and $30 trillion of wealth offshore.

As The Observer reports, even at the lower figure, that's "as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together." Developing countries in particular should note that the amounts their one percenters have squirreled away overseas since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world. An accompanying chart shows that, in Nigeria, for instance, $300 billion in wealth has been secreted out of the country--an amount 40 times the nation's entire foreign debt load.

Where do you find the real cheats and criminals? In the highest echelons of high society.