SINCE THE global financial crisis of 2007-09 the days of offshore finance have regularly looked numbered. In 2010 America passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which required foreign financial firms to disclose the assets of Americans. A year later Nicolas Sarkozy—who led both France and the G20 at the time—boldly declared that tax havens would face global ostracism. In 2016 investigative reporters unearthed the “Panama papers”, a vast cache of documents that traced hundreds of thousands of tax-dodgers. The revelations led many rich-world governments to force offshore centres to create registers of beneficial ownership and share information with other jurisdictions on pain of sanctions.