Inequality is likely second only to climate change on the list of defining issues of today, and this book approaches the issue from a unique angle.

There are dozens of books about rich people behaving badly, and the ideas of tax havens, offshore accounts, holding companies and multiple citizenship all work their way into the plots of movies and tv shows. But how and why did those things come to exist? How exactly did our system evolve to this point, where uber-rich business people, russisan oligarchs and corrupt leaders of resource-rich African nations are all part of the same social club? This is Moneyland — a constantly changing collection of jurisdictions with privacy laws, reporting structures and corrupt systems that enable all kinds of unsavoury folk to hide money from tax authorities, governments or citizens of exploited countries.

Bullough is a great writer and researcher, who leans on history, geopolitics and economics as well as Fredrick Forsythe, Goldfinger, and Say Yes to the Dress to help describe the mechanics of the world we live in.

He starts with Ukraine — former President Viktor Yanukovich was clearly corrupt and had real estate holdings that didn’t make sense for a person of his stature. From there he zooms in to how the culture of bribery infiltrates nearly every system in the country, and out to how the broader economy and political structure of Europe enables it.

He skewers the Western concept of the ‘developing country’ — while it’s common to think of poor countries simply at a different place on the timeline that eventually leads to liberal democracy, that’s not the case at all, and in many ways it’s the liberal democracies that make and maintain that system.

He comees at the tax system both internationally (Swiss and Cayman bank accounts) and in the United States (real estate in NY and Florida, bizarre tax laws in Arizona and South Dakota), and the hypocrisy of America’s expectations for financial transparency from other countries while not providing the same.

Through it all, the theme is clear: the rich operate by a different set of rules than the rest, and that’s by design. And while some steps have been taken in recent years to rein them in, there seems to be no shortage of new schemes and structures to continue enabling it. The book is funny and infuriating. It’s exhaustive, but not exhausting. It’s actually entertaining.