Casey Michel argues that the United States, rather than some offshore island, became the world's most attractive destination for laundering illicit wealth — a status built deliberately, state by state, over decades of anonymous-shell-company law.
He traces how states like Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming competed to offer the loosest corporate-formation rules in the world, letting anyone anywhere register a company with no disclosure of its real owner — a gap that keeps other countries' anti-corruption regimes largely blind to money moving through America.
Real estate emerges as a favored landing spot: high-end property, bought through shell entities with no financing and no visible owner, that launders looted wealth into an asset that quietly appreciates while asking no questions.
The book's warning is aimed at policymakers as much as readers: reforms like the Corporate Transparency Act address part of the gap, but enforcement capacity and political will remain the binding constraint — which is exactly the terrain a "take the foreign money" or "loot the watchdogs" category on this tracker sits on.