gabriel zucman is back with us page he is interested professor at -- he is an assistant professor atrkeley. ,ladimir putin, david cameron through his family, for instance, xi jinping, have been enrolled in this panama papers leak. why have we not seen big american names? gabriel: again, it is one firm and one tax haven. no way it is going to be a representative for what is happening on a global scale. that is one thing. the other things you don't need to go to panama to create shell .ompanies it is very easy, way too easy, to create an shell companies here in the u.s. why go to panama? scarlet: that is really good point, joe there are companies in reno that are exempt from the international disclosure. joe: right, is anything being done on the u.s. front? jesse at bloomberg has done a lot of reporting on the ability to hide money easily in the u.s. people are calling the u.s. the new switzerland. is anything being done on the u.s. front to crack down on this? gabriel: you know, there's this international attempt at constructing a system of automatic exchange and bank information. the

in a fascinating book that came out last year, berkeley economics professor, gabriel zucman, tried toy the wealth held in tax havens worldwide. the total was at least $7.6 trillion he said, 8% of the world's household wealth. that share is even higher in developing countries, 20 to 30% in many latin american and african nations, and as much as 50% in russia, he says. perhaps it wasn't surprising that one of the stars of the panama papers was vladimir putin. a kremlin spokesman says that the allegations were simply a show of putin phobia, but it was alleged that at least $2 billion was transferred through secretive financial entities connected to putin's associates. how did the united states fair in the panama scandal? no prominent american public officials have been named so far. but the truth is that americans don't really need to go offshore to keep their finances secret. as matthew gardener of the institute on taxation and economic policy recently pointed out on cnn.com, the tax justice network ranked the u.s. as the world's third worst offender for allowing financial secrecy. it i