Unmasking the Financial Secrecy System: How Rogue Capitalism Threatens Democracy and the Rule of Law

Raymond Baker is a businessman, author, and internationally respected authority on corruption, money laundering, and foreign policy issues. He has conducted business around the world, buying and building companies, consulting on anti corruption strategies, and advising on economic matters at the highest levels of government. These experiences confirm his observation that standard business practices, both legal and illegal, funnel money unseen and unrecorded across borders, heightening inequality and weakening democracy.

Baker received a MacArthur Foundation grant to support in-depth research on illicit financial flows as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. This research culminated in his first book, Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, cited by the Financial Times as one of the “best business books of 2005.”

Baker founded Global Financial Integrity in Washington, DC, to focus on issues surrounding harmful economic practices. He serves on the High-Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa and is a co-founder of the DC Forum, which advocates for financial transparency and accountability to strengthen democracy and capitalism.

Baker is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Moderator

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and continues as a consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy.

At Stanford, he is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology, and he directs the Arab Reform and Democracy Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He also co-leads the Hoover programs on China's Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and the FSI program, the Global Digital Policy Incubator, which is part of the Cyber Policy Center.

He received all of his degrees from Stanford University, including a B.A. in 1974, an M.A. in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1980. He taught Sociology at Vanderbilt University from 1980-85.