EDGS Conference: Evasive Riches and the Fight against Extreme Inequality

Lineup

• More details about Steven Baker

  Steven Baker

  Specializing in international financial litigation including trust disputes, commercial disputes and civil fraud, Baker is an expert at unravelling complex offshore trust structures and resolving the issues which arise. He is frequently instructed to advise on the strategic approach needed for cross-border litigation.

  • Steven Baker's website
• More details about Jack Blum

  Jack Blum

  Jack Blum is a Washington-based attorney, international policy advisor, and leading authority on financial crime, corruption, money laundering, and offshore tax evasion. Over a distinguished career spanning government service, international development, law, and public policy, he has played a pivotal role in some of the most significant investigations into corporate misconduct, international corruption, and illicit finance of the past half century. A graduate of Bard College and Columbia Law School, Blum began his public-service career with the U.S. Senate, where he worked for Senator Philip Hart’s Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee. There, he led investigations into the newspaper, petroleum, banking, and real estate industries, helping uncover discriminatory lending practices, mortgage fraud, and environmental harms. He later joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where his work on multinational corporations, international banking, and foreign corruption contributed to landmark investigations that exposed bribery by Lockheed Aircraft. Those inquiries helped spur passage of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a cornerstone of global anti-corruption enforcement. In the 1980s and 1990s, Blum became a leading investigator of international money laundering, drug-trafficking networks, and offshore financial secrecy. His work on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) helped expose one of the largest banking scandals in modern history. He later advised the Internal Revenue Service on offshore tax evasion, collaborated with major media organizations on investigative reporting projects, and participated in undercover investigations that brought international attention to hidden financial systems and regulatory failures. Blum has also served as a consultant and advisor to the United Nations, leading international initiatives on corruption, asset recovery, anti-money-laundering policy, and financial transparency. He has worked extensively with governments, regulators, law-enforcement agencies, and international organizations around the world to strengthen efforts against illicit finance and recover stolen public assets. Today, Jack Blum remains an influential voice on financial accountability and democratic governance. He serves as Counsel to Americans for Democratic Action and is Chair of Tax Justice Network USA and the Violence Policy Center. His lifelong work has helped shape global understanding of corruption, offshore finance, and the challenges of ensuring transparency in the international financial system.

• More details about Bruce Carruthers

  Bruce Carruthers

  At Northwestern, Bruce Carruthers is involved in the graduate Comparative Historical Social Science (CHSS) program and the Kellogg-Sociology Joint-PhD program. His current research projects include a comparative study of the institutional foundations of long-term decision-making, the adoption of “for-profit” features by U.S. museums, the relationship between corporate taxation and corporate social responsibility, and how “big data” affects credit markets. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Library of Congress, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, he is a non-resident long-term fellow at the Swedish Collegium. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/quantitative distinction is worth fighting over. Northwestern is Carruthers’ first teaching position. Carruthers has authored or co-authored six books, "City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution" (Princeton, 1996), "Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States" (Oxford, 1998), "Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and Social Structure" (Pine Forge Press, 2000), "Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis" (Stanford, 2009), "Money and Credit: A Sociological Approach" (Polity Press, 2010), and "The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America" (Princeton, 2022).

• More details about Charles Davidson

  Charles Davidson

  Charles Davidson has been involved in various efforts at reform of the “offshore” financial secrecy system since 2006, when he co-founded Global Financial Integrity with Raymond Baker, and a few years later the FACT Coalition with Jack Blum. He was Executive Producer of Sundance documentary We’re Not Broke (2012). Concurrently he was Publisher of The American Interest from 2005 to 2020, which published extensively on the subject at hand including landmark pieces by James S. Henry and Jeffrey Winters. In 2014 he founded and was Executive Director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at Hudson Institute, testified regarding the national security threats associated with kleptocracy before the Senate Committee of the Judiciary, the Helsinki Commission, and the House Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats. Earlier in his career, Davidson was in the information technology industry, in executive management and later in venture capital. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College, with an MBA from Duke University.

• More details about Matthew Duss

  Matthew Duss

  Matthew Duss is Executive Vice-President at the Center for International Policy. Before joining CIP, Duss was a visiting scholar in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2017-22, Duss was foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). From 2014-17, Duss was the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. From 2008-14 Duss was a National Security and International Policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

• More details about Leah McGrath Goodman

  Leah McGrath Goodman

  For more than twenty years, author and investigative journalist Leah McGrath Goodman has written about global finance and cultures of secrecy. A former special writer for The Wall Street Journal and finance editor at Newsweek, she's won numerous awards, grants and commendations for her work and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Goodman has written from New York, Boston, London and Dubai for The Financial Times, The Guardian, Fortune, Institutional Investor, The Telegraph, Barron’s, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She's been a Scripps Howard Foundation environmental journalism fellow and visiting faculty member at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She's also testified before Congress on Freedom of Information Act issues. More recently, she's served as a visiting university lecturer, launching the multidisciplinary course, "Corruption, Money and Power." Goodman is a member of the London Speaker Bureau and the Middle East Speakers Bureau. She is an author at HarperCollins in the U.S. and Hachette in the UK. Her books have been published and reprinted throughout the Americas, UK, Europe and Asia. Goodman holds degrees in journalism and political science, graduating magna cum laude. In 2025, she also earned a Master’s in Corruption, Analysis and Governance with first-class honors from the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

• More details about Jennifer Gould

  Jennifer Gould

  Details forthcoming!

• More details about Brooke Harrington

  Brooke Harrington

  Brooke Harrington is a Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and an internationally recognized expert on wealth inequality, offshore finance, and the social structures that sustain extreme concentrations of wealth. Her research examines the global networks of wealth managers, tax havens, and financial professionals that shape the movement and protection of private fortunes around the world. Harrington is the author of the award-winning "Capital without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent" and the acclaimed "Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism" (2024), which was named a Best Book by the Financial Times and a notable book by The New Yorker.  A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard University, Harrington has held academic and research appointments at Brown University, Copenhagen Business School, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and the European University Institute. Her work has been supported by major grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Beyond academia, Harrington is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other leading publications, and has advised organizations including the United Nations, OECD, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Parliament. Her scholarship brings rare insight into the hidden financial systems that shape inequality, democracy, and global governance in the twenty-first century.

• More details about James Henry

  James Henry

  James S. Henry is an economist, attorney, investigative journalist, and internationally recognized authority on tax justice, offshore finance, capital flight, and global economic inequality. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has combined leadership in business, public policy, nonprofit advocacy, and investigative reporting to expose the hidden financial systems that enable wealth concentration and tax avoidance around the world. In the private sector, Henry held senior positions at McKinsey & Company, IBM/Lotus Development Corporation, General Electric, and Monitor, and founded the consulting firm Sag Harbor Group, advising corporations, governments, financial institutions, and foundations on strategy and economic development. He has also launched several technology and investment ventures in the United States and Latin America. Henry is a Senior Advisor to the Tax Justice Network, a founder of Tax Justice USA, and a former leader within the Global Alliance for Tax Justice. His research has played a pivotal role in advancing public understanding of tax havens, offshore wealth, and financial secrecy. He is the principal author of "The Price of Offshore Revisited" (2012), the landmark study that provided one of the first comprehensive estimates of the size of the global offshore economy and helped bring international attention to the issue. As an investigative journalist, Henry has reported on corruption, illicit financial flows, debt crises, and organized crime across more than 50 countries. His work has contributed to major criminal investigations and asset recovery efforts and has been featured in leading media outlets worldwide. He is also the author of several influential books, including "The Blood Bankers," a groundbreaking examination of Third World debt and financial corruption. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Henry is a frequent speaker before universities, international organizations, and policy forums. His work continues to inform debates on economic justice, financial transparency, democratic governance, and the global consequences of hidden wealth.

• More details about David Cay Johnston

  David Cay Johnston

  David Cay Johnston began documenting our government’s central role in creating inequality in 1995, when he joined The New York Times, reporting that earned him a Pulitzer Prize and produced a bestselling trilogy on the American economy. Since 2024, he's been a professor of practice at Rochester Institute of Technology, teaching white-collar crime, law, and journalism, following 15 years on the faculty at Syracuse University College of Law. His next book will propose an entirely new federal tax code.

• More details about Gary Kalman

  Gary Kalman

  Kalman is the Executive Director of Transparency International U.S. (TI US) where he oversees the organization’s U.S. operations focusing on illicit finance and the U.S. role in global anti-corruption efforts. Prior to joining TI US, he was a founder and Executive Director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition where he advanced policies and practices to enhance financial integrity in U.S. markets and globally. At the FACT Coalition and later, with TI US, he led successful efforts to increase corporate transparency in the U.S., increase corporate tax transparency, and worked with emerging market investors to champion the adoption of a first-of-its-kind governance-linked bond. He was also a founder of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition that, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, led the successful campaign to pass the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Shortly after coming to Washington, he directed the federal legislative office for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and was a leading voice for congressional ethics and lobbying reform having sat on a bipartisan task force convened by the Speaker of the House. He taught at the LaSalle University School of Business and the Fox School of Business at Temple University. He is currently an Advisory Committee member of the International Coalition Against Illicit Economies and has testified on multiple occasions as an expert witness on financial integrity before the U.S. Congress.

• More details about Matti Kohonen

  Matti Kohonen

  Matti Kohonen was appointed FTC director in early 2021. He previously worked at Christian Aid as the Economic Justice Lead Advisor, working to ensure that global economic governance is fair, accountable and that all countries participate equally in managing tax, debt, anti-money laundering rules, in achieving a global economy that is aligned with human rights, gender justice and climate justice as goals. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where based on ethnographic research project in Ghana he looked at the social values of social enterprises in the cocoa and IT sectors, and how value creation works beyond economic value. He has worked over 10 years also on the impact of financial and tax policies on developing countries and populations, and is a founding member of the Tax Justice Network, part of Oxfam's inequality campaign, and author of an edited volume ‘Righting the Economy'. Matti worked for a number of years in developing country-based analysis and proposals for progressive fiscal policies. He has also been actively involved in the Financing for Development (FfD) process at the UN, and more recently in the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Co-operation, and how established standards and norms for private finance can meet development objectives.

• More details about Zoë Reiter

  Zoë Reiter

  Zoë is the first thematic director for combating kleptocracy at the National Endowment for Democracy, where she supports global efforts to dismantle the illicit financial flows that fuel anti-democratic behavior. She co-founded the Anti-Corruption Data Collective in 2019 and has spent over fifteen years working across the US, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe to counter transnational corruption, including as director of strategic initiatives at the Project On Government Oversight and in senior roles at Transparency International.

• More details about Doron Shiffer-Sebba

  Doron Shiffer-Sebba

  Details forthcoming!

• More details about Jeffrey Winters

  Jeffrey Winters

  Details forthcoming!