It’s nice when one thing in the Financial Times acts as an unplanned yet completely effective rejoinder to another.  First, we have Jose Manuel Barroso explaning what a brilliant job he’s doing in getting tax and regulatory havens under control, notwithstanding the absence of any explanation of how exactly they contributed to the crisis —

He rejected suggestions that EU policymakers, who are preparing tougher measures against tax havens, hedge funds, private equity groups and executive pay, were cracking down on “easy targets” that had not been the fundamental causes of the crisis.

“For more than 30 years the Commission was trying to get co-operation from non-co-operative jurisdictions. And now they’ve moved. Was that an easy target?” he said, referring to tax havens such as Andorra, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

But then we get John Kay, providing a nice overview of why tax and regulatory havens exist —

Today’s political outrage is humbug. Havens exist only because larger states allow them to exist, and larger states allow them to exist because the customers of havens are the rich and powerful. In the 1860s, the typical client of a haven was a patron of Blanc’s casino [Monaco]: in the years after 2000, the typical client of a haven was a hedge fund registered in Grand Cayman. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

He doesn’t mention the time that Charles de Gaulle nearly shut down Monaco when it looked like it might be used a major tax dodge by French citizens.  So that 30 years of effort that Barroso cites is meaningless.  The financial crisis has created some dissonant music in the Rick’s Cafes of the world, so the shutters are down for a while.  But once we have a new prevailing wind, they’ll be back.  And Citigroup, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, Fortis, Unicredit, and all the rest of them will still have hit the rocks as regulated institutions in large economies, not as shady banks in sunny places.