Economic headwinds blow hard

Dominic Carman

As the World Bank forecasts stagflation, offshore firms see a silver lining

Except for a depressingly small minority among them, lawyers know nothing. They are incapable of logic.’ The words of Willem Buiter, a distinguished academic and former chief economist at Citigroup. His polemic against lawyers is quoted extensively in an Economist article headed ‘Can lawyers be economists?’

Buiter’s judgment is clearly flawed. Offshore lawyers may not know the intricacies of modern monetary theory, but they do understand opportunity cost, diminishing returns, market equilibrium, economic efficiency, comparative advantage, and so on. They have to. Not only are they advising business clients whose commercial decisions are dependent upon anticipating and reacting to economic events, but they are also running sizeable international businesses themselves, spread across a range of far-flung islands.