OK, again, you make good points about Singapore being like a second Switzerland. But what I was trying to convey initially is that such countries are like oversized tax heavens. Combined population of both is what, 10 million? Compared to 8 billion humans living in this world. That was my point. How many more countries can you convert to live off finance? It's a niche, a very cozy one for sure, but it's not something that would be globally applicable. And anyway, since most of the capital flowing through these small countries is foreign, it's subject to the restrictions of the countries of the origin. So it's not really Switzerland or Singapore's capital.
The enslaving happens by 'financialization' of industries. This term has already well known meaning which you can look-up to get a good description because I'm afraid I can't articulate it good enough. But in a nutshell it means destroying industrial base for short-term gains and siphoning off of _existing_ wealth from the industry into finance.
Finance is one example of a service based industry. Tourism is another, and there are plenty of countries with extensive tourism industries. There's also healthcare, hospitality in general, media, education, etc.
> And anyway, since most of the capital flowing through these small countries is foreign, it's subject to the restrictions of the countries of the origin. So it's not really Switzerland or Singapore's capital. The enslaving happens by 'financialization' of industries.
There are basically two ways to use other people's money: via debt or via equity. Those other people would either be your creditors or your shareholders.
When people use 'slavery' metaphors in the context of finance, they usually mean to say that debtors are the slaves of the creditors. You seem to imply that the notion is the other way round? That's somewhat peculiar.
For 'financialisation', I am going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization and it doesn't seem particularly scary. Though different people seem to mean very different things by that word. Eg the introduction talks about increasing debt-to-equity ratios.
If you are worried about those ratios, ie about leverage, one targeted change you could make is to remove the tax advantage that debt enjoys over equity: companies typically get to pay interest with pre-tax dollars and have to pay dividends with post-tax dollars.
If you want companies to use relatively more equity and less debt, you should remove that subsidy of debt.
> But in a nutshell it means destroying industrial base for short-term gains and siphoning off of _existing_ wealth from the industry into finance.
How do you 'destroy' an 'industrial base for short-term gains'? Usually a short term focus in the economy means that interest rates are high. But I'm not quite sure how that fits here.
