It's a pathetic joke. The US has very little real financial secrecy. The Feds have trivial access to all financial transactions inside of the US if they have cause to need to look. Beyond that, the majority of US wealth is contained in the stock market and land, both of which tend to reveal the wealthy due to public records (which is how we know how much land Bill Gates has been accumulating and how many shares of Tesla Elon Musk owns). The US has a small number of unknown super wealthy because of that, whereas China and Russia are extraordinarily opaque by comparison. The US also requires its politicians to report their wealth within a range. Now try to get that kind of information from Putin or Xi.
Yeah, I do taxes for a living, and people seriously underestimate how hard it is for anyone to hide a substantial amount of money that was made in the U.S. As soon as you want to do anything with it besides hide it under your mattress, there's going to be a record of it that either the state or federal government can obtain.
I think the idea is to hide from other countries. So if you are a wealthy Chinese you have a much better time hiding your money in Delaware than in Paris for instance.
This reminds me of a term used on one of those expat/sovereign man blogs: "Redundant Array of Independent Jurisdictions". The idea being that you have citizenship from Country A, reside in Country B, and run your finances through Country C, so you have no single-point-of-failure in governance over your life/assets.
The main issue is certain US states, such as Delaware, allow you to set up anonymous shell companies. Anonymous shell companies are a bit like BitTorrent. Sure, there are legal uses, but there are a lot more illegal ones.
This is a bad analogy (so bear with me), Let's say you want to operate an anonymous private mail server, having an anonymous shell corp is like registering your domain name anonymously. Sure an important piece of the puzzle but nothing close to achieving the whole objective. You then need acquire all the other pieces of the puzzle anonymously as well (which is incredibly hard - especially without committing innumerable crimes along the way).
Seperately, I listened to the podcast, those two are financially literate.
I have a friend in DE who works for a company whose main reason for existence is setting up shell companies to hide luxury assets for rich Europeans and Russians (planes, yachts, etc)
