Power today doesn’t announce itself with palaces and crowns. It flows through fiber optic cables, hides behind corporate veils, and disperses across jurisdictions like water finding every crack in a foundation. The question isn’t whether concentrated wealth and influence exist—the data on inequality makes that undeniable—but why this concentration proves so resistant to identification, scrutiny, and reform.The answer lies in three interlocking systems that have fundamentally transformed how power operates: globalization’s erasure of meaningful boundaries, technology’s acceleration of complexity, and legal structures designed explicitly to obscure ownership and accountability.
The Globalization Advantage
Wealth and power once had addresses. A baron owned land you could point to. A monopolist ran factories in specific cities. Even mid-20th century corporate titans operated within national frameworks where regulators, journalists, and citizens could theoretically track their activities.Globalization shattered this geographic legibility. Capital now moves at the speed of thought across borders, seeking the most favorable regulatory environment for each specific function. A company might be incorporated in Delaware for its business-friendly laws, headquartered in London for financial access, manufacture in Vietnam for low labor costs, hold intellectual property in Ireland for tax advantages, and route profits through the Cayman Islands to minimize obligations entirely.This jurisdictional arbitrage creates a fundamental asymmetry: corporations and wealthy individuals can shop globally for the most advantageous rules, while regulators, tax authorities, and reformers remain trapped within national boundaries. A Senator cannot subpoena records held in Luxembourg. A journalist investigating corruption cannot compel testimony from witnesses in multiple countries with conflicting legal systems.The result is what legal scholars call “regulatory arbitrage”—the systematic exploitation of gaps between jurisdictions. When every country competes to attract capital by offering greater secrecy, lower taxes, or weaker labor protections, a race to the bottom becomes inevitable. The winners are those with enough resources to play this global game. The losers are local communities, workers, and governments trying to enforce basic standards.
Technology as Complexity Multiplier
If globalization created geographic dispersion, technology has enabled operational complexity that makes tracking power nearly impossible without sophisticated tools that only a few possess.
Modern financial instruments operate at a level of abstraction that defies intuitive understanding. Derivatives, structured products, algorithmic trading, and synthetic securities create layers of separation between ultimate beneficial owners and the assets they control. When a hedge fund uses credit default swaps to take synthetic short positions in mortgage-backed securities that themselves bundle thousands of individual loans, who exactly is responsible when the system collapses?
High-frequency trading algorithms execute millions of transactions per second, moving money through chains of ownership too rapid for human oversight. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, whatever their theoretical transparency, often function in practice to enable anonymous transfers and obfuscate the trail of funds. Wealth can be stored in digital wallets, NFTs, or decentralized finance protocols that exist outside traditional banking systems entirely.The speed and complexity create an information asymmetry. Those with resources hire teams of quantitative analysts, tax attorneys, and compliance specialists who understand these systems intimately. Regulators, chronically underfunded and understaffed, struggle to keep pace. By the time investigators understand one scheme, the money has moved and the methods have evolved.Technology also enables unprecedented data collection and analysis—but primarily for those who can afford it. Palantir and similar companies provide governments and corporations with surveillance and analytical capabilities that would have seemed like science fiction a generation ago. Yet this panopticon faces inward and downward, monitoring populations rather than scrutinizing the powerful. The same tools that track every transaction of welfare recipients rarely illuminate the offshore accounts of billionaires.
The Legal Entity Labyrinth
Perhaps most crucial are the legal structures specifically designed to obscure ownership and shield assets from accountability. This isn’t a bug in the system—it’s a feature, deliberately constructed over decades by lawyers serving wealthy clients and jurisdictions competing for their business.Shell companies and special purpose vehicles allow the creation of corporate entities that exist purely on paper, with no employees, no offices, and no business operations beyond holding assets or facilitating transactions. These entities can own other entities in nested hierarchies that create matryoshka dolls of ownership, each layer making it harder to identify the actual human beings who benefit.Trusts, particularly those in secrecy jurisdictions, separate legal ownership from beneficial ownership. The trustee technically controls assets, but does so according to instructions from beneficiaries whose identities may never appear in public records. Discretionary trusts give trustees nominal power to distribute assets as they see fit—a flexibility that protects beneficiaries from claims or scrutiny while ensuring money flows as intended.
Offshore financial centers like the British Virgin Islands, Panama, and the Cayman Islands have built entire economies around providing these services. They offer minimal disclosure requirements, no public registries of beneficial ownership, and legal systems designed to resist foreign information requests. When journalists exposed the Panama Papers in 2016, revealing how 214,000 offshore entities were used to hide wealth and evade taxes, it was only because of a massive data leak—not because existing oversight systems worked.
Private equity and sovereign wealth funds add additional layers. Private equity operates largely outside public disclosure requirements, buying companies, loading them with debt, extracting fees, and selling the pieces without the transparency required of publicly traded firms. Sovereign wealth funds—essentially nation-states operating as investors—combine the opacity of government with the flexibility of private capital, often controlled by a small elite within the country that established them.
Foundations and nonprofit structures complete the picture. While many serve legitimate charitable purposes, these vehicles can also function as dynasty trusts that maintain family control over assets across generations while providing tax benefits and public relations benefits. When a billionaire places assets in a foundation, they often retain effective control through board positions and guidelines while claiming philanthropic intent.
The Network Effect
These three systems don’t just coexist—they reinforce each other synergistically. Technology enables the rapid movement of capital that makes globalization functional. Globalization creates the competitive pressure for jurisdictions to offer legal structures that obscure ownership. Legal entities facilitate the complex transactions that technology makes possible.The result is a network rather than a hierarchy. Power doesn’t flow from a single source but emerges from relationships between nodes—individuals, corporations, banks, law firms, and governments—that may themselves be opaque. Ownership chains cross jurisdictions, asset classes, and legal structures in ways that resist simple mapping.
Consider a straightforward question: Who owns a particular piece of valuable real estate in Manhattan? The deed might show ownership by an LLC registered in Delaware. That LLC is wholly owned by a trust established in South Dakota. The trust beneficiaries include another LLC in the Cayman Islands and a foundation in Liechtenstein. The Cayman entity is owned by a company in Singapore, which is owned by yet another structure in Hong Kong. Each jurisdiction has different disclosure rules, different legal procedures for information requests, and different relationships with other governments.Following this chain requires resources, expertise, legal authority across multiple jurisdictions, and most critically, time. By the time investigators work through the maze, ownership may have changed hands, structures may have been dissolved and reformed, or statutes of limitations may have expired.
The Accountability Gap
This architecture creates what we might call an accountability gap—a space where enormous power operates largely free from democratic oversight, legal constraints, or public awareness.When corporations harm workers or communities, victims often discover they’re suing entities with minimal assets while the actual profits have been extracted through management fees paid to parent companies, licensing fees paid to intellectual property holders, or loans from related entities—all structured to be legally separate and thus immune from liability.When wealthy individuals avoid taxes, they’re not typically breaking laws but rather using the complex interplay of jurisdictions and legal structures to minimize obligations in ways that are technically legal but would be impossible without significant resources. The result is a two-tiered system where ordinary wage earners pay their full share while the ultra-wealthy achieve effective tax rates that would shock most citizens if the details were accessible.When financial crises occur—as in 2008—establishing accountability becomes nearly impossible. The complexity of the instruments involved, the global nature of the institutions, and the layers of corporate structure mean that responsibility is diffused. Regulators struggle to determine what happened, much less who should face consequences. The refrain “too big to fail” really means “too complex to unwind and too networked to isolate.”
Why Reform Proves So Difficult
Understanding why oligarchic power persists requires recognizing that dismantling it would require coordination across all three dimensions simultaneously—and that each dimension has its own constituencies resisting change.Globalization benefits from powerful ideological support. Free movement of capital is defended as essential for economic efficiency, innovation, and growth. Any country that attempts stronger regulation risks capital flight, with investors moving to more accommodating jurisdictions. This creates a collective action problem: meaningful reform requires international coordination, but each nation has incentives to defect and attract mobile capital.Technology’s complexity serves those who master it, creating information asymmetries that translate directly into profit and power. The financial industry employs some of the world’s most talented mathematicians and programmers precisely to find exploitable edges in complexity. Simplification would eliminate these advantages, creating obvious resistance from a sector with tremendous political influence.
Legal structures are defended by entire industries—law firms, accounting firms, wealth management companies—whose business models depend on maintaining and navigating this complexity. These aren’t fringe operators but prestigious firms that employ thousands, donate to political campaigns, and testify before legislatures about the importance of “competitiveness” and “attracting investment.”
Perhaps most significantly, the politicians and officials who might reform these systems are themselves often beneficiaries. Campaign finance flows through many of the same structures. Political leaders frequently come from or return to the industries they’re meant to regulate. The revolving door between government, finance, and corporate law means that those with the authority to change the system have personal and professional incentives to maintain it.
The Visibility Problem
All of this creates what might be called the visibility problem: power that is diffuse, technical, and jurisdictionally scattered doesn’t generate the clear villains that motivate political action. People intuitively understand a robber baron’s mansion or a monopolist’s stranglehold on prices. They struggle to get angry about beneficial ownership transparency requirements or transfer pricing regulations.This benefits existing power structures enormously. Social movements need clear targets and simple demands. “Break up the trusts” worked as a rallying cry in the Progressive Era because everyone could picture Standard Oil’s dominance. “
Require country-by-country reporting of multinational tax payments and establish a public registry of beneficial owners for all legal entities” doesn’t fit on a protest sign, even though it might be more important.The complexity serves as a moat protecting concentrated power from democratic pressure. By the time journalists have explained the issue, audiences have lost interest. By the time reformers have crafted policy proposals, lobbyists have identified and exploited their weaknesses. By the time legislation passes, it’s been watered down through compromises or rendered ineffective through carve-outs and exceptions.
The modern concentration of wealth and power differs fundamentally from historical oligarchies because it operates through systems rather than personalities. The feudal lord was visible, as was the 19th-century industrialist. Today’s power is networked, technical, and deliberately obscured through legal and technological mechanisms that make identification difficult and accountability nearly impossible.This isn’t to suggest conspiracy—no smoke-filled room coordinates these developments. Rather, it’s the predictable result of systems optimizing for the interests of those with resources to exploit them. Globalization, technology, and legal structures each make perfect sense from the perspective of capital seeking returns and individuals seeking to protect wealth. That these systems collectively create opacity and resist democratic oversight is consequence rather than design.Yet consequence becomes structure, and structure becomes power. The question isn’t whether some shadowy cabal controls the world, but whether our institutions—designed for a world of geographic stability, technological simplicity, and corporate transparency—can even perceive let alone regulate the forces shaping our economy and society.
Until we develop governance mechanisms that operate at the same scale, speed, and sophistication as global capital, the asymmetry will persist. Power will remain concentrated not because it’s defended by armies, but because it’s hidden in spreadsheets, dispersed across jurisdictions, and wrapped in enough legal complexity that by the time anyone understands what happened, the game has already moved on.