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The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance

The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance

Independent POV
6 HN recommenders · discussed 2019–2024
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About this video

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

Why it appears in the archive

Commenters repeatedly recommend it in tax haven and offshore finance threads as an excellent, low-budget overview of British offshore finance.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

marcusjt · 2019-10 · strong rec

This is an incredible documentary about British tax havens and the influence of the City of London in the running of UK government & foreign policy [VIDEO]

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arminiusreturns · 2019-11 · strong rec

For those interested in this subject, I can't recommend the documentary "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire" [1] highly enough. The guy who behind it not only did an excellent job, but did it for a tiny fraction of what a bigger studio would have spent for a much more inferior end result. [1] [VIDEO]

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arminiusreturns · 2020-09 · strong rec

If are interested in this topic and you haven't seen the independent documentary "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire", you owe it to yourself. It's a superbly done documentary on a budget of ~4k£. [VIDEO]

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arminiusreturns · 2024-07 · strong rec

Anybody who is interested in this topic really needs to go see this awesome documentary: The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance [VIDEO] It was even done on a 4klb budget!!! The reality is that the brits realized they could no longer maintain hard power and Lionel Curtis was the primary pusher of the psyop transition to "commonwealth" soft power while maintaining all the real vestiges of empire under a false name.

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patrickk · 2019-09 · rec

If this is a topic of interest, I can recommend this independently created documentary 'The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire'. It's the story of how Britain's elite created a financial web spanning the globe, replacing the old empire with a new financial one, running from the Commonwealth countries back to London. That's why so many overseas British territories are associated with money laundering and tax evasion. Free to watch on YouTube: [VIDEO]

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zaro · 2019-11 · rec

> Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth This is easy, after all hiding cash is needed by everybody. And when it comes to finance , there are no countries only financial interest. Of course nothing bad will happen to these financial heavens, because they are protected by the richest and most powerful people and organisations. "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire"[1] gives a good overview of how this started. [1] [VIDEO]

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atweiden · 2021-03 · rec

Kind of off-topic, but there's an excellent documentary called The Spider’s Web [1] that explores how society reached this point of valuing increasingly ridiculous displays of paper wealth and the financialization of everything through the lens of British offshore wealth secrecy schemes. [1]: [VIDEO]

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olivermarks · 2022-06 · rec

The challenge for the UK is that the flywheel of the City of London corporation and its offshore wormholes were at the core of globalization. Ironically the nation state the CoL coexists with (the UK) is as large a casualty of this as the many colonial nation states ravaged by globalization. This was compounded by the globalists - which the Economist exists to promote - forcing the merger of the UK into the european union. The vote to leave by the proletariat demonstrated massive dissatisfaction, but sadly there are subsequently no credible political parties or leadership that are not closely aligned with the CoL and/or the EU, resulting in a becalming. The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | Documentary Film [VIDEO] 'Michael Oswald's film The Spider's Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance'. 80 minutes, well worth watching imo

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