An outsider's guide inside the Panama Papers.

Whether you're a politician trying to hide your money from the electorate, if you're a Ponzi schemer, if you're a mobster, if you're a drug smuggler - you're going to use offshore. Any major Ponzi scheme, from Madoff on down, involves an offshore element, in terms of setting up the scheme and moving money to keep it out of the hands of investigators and lawyers.

Investigative journalist Michael Hudson digs into the story of the Panama Papers, explaining the origins of the financial data leak, the radical motivations of the still-anonymous leaker, and the ways financial elites buy both secrecy and complicity in hiding their money, and explains why challenging the global problem of offshore secrecy requires investigating the biggest islands in the secrecy shell game - Manhattan and Great Britain.

Mike Hudson's latest writing on the story is Panama Papers Include Dozens of Americans Tied to Fraud and Financial Misconduct for ICIJ.