The leak of the so-called “Panama Papers”—the roughly 11 million documents from the Panama-based international law firm Mossack Fonseca, provided to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) by an anonymous whistleblower—has generated an enormous amount of coverage and commentary (including on this blog: see here, here, here, and here). The identity of the person who leaked the documents is still unknown, but (as many readers are already no doubt aware), this individual posted a “manifesto” last month under the name “John Doe,” explaining his motives in leaking the documents and advocating the sorts of reforms he or she believes are necessary to combat the evils that the Panama Papers reveal and represent. I’m not sure how many of our readers have already read the manifesto, but if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you do. It’s a fascinating document, obviously written by somebody who is both passionate and very well-informed. I’m not sure whether I agree with everything in it—the spirit of the manifesto is radical, even revolutionary, while by nature I tend to be more cautious and incremental—but I think that everyone ought to read the manifesto and take it seriously.

In terms of specific policy reforms, much of what the manifesto proposes has been widely discussed elsewhere: a call public corporate registers (including calls for the UK to extend its domestic initiatives in this area to its overseas territories and dependencies, and for the US to impose transparency and disclosure requirements on individual states); demand for reform of America’s “broken campaign finance system”; and the criticism of the “revolving door” between regulatory agencies and the financial institutions they regulate. (On this last point, by the way, I think John Doe’s analysis is both overly simplistic and overly nasty. He singles out Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the former director of the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), calls her “spineless” and castigates her for going to work for HSBC, “one of the most notorious banks on the planet.” I think the general criticism of the revolving door is too simple for reasons I have laid out previously, and it’s unfair in this context in particular because Ms. Calvery in fact had a reputation for aggressive enforcement. Maybe John Doe knows something about Ms. Calvery’s tenure at FinCEN that I don’t, but I found that this petty name-calling, not backed up by any evidence beyond vague insinuations and guilt-by-association, to be both off-putting and out of character with the rest of the manifesto.)

But in addition to these fairly familiar themes, John Doe’s manifesto lays out two radical policy proposals that, so far as I can tell, have gotten very little attention in the discussions of the Panama Papers, or even in discussions of the manifesto specifically. Both are worth taking seriously, though both make me uncomfortable: Continue reading →