An essential component of this offshore financial innovation was the emergence of a world-wide network of tax havens. By using such a network, a multinational corporation operating in four or five countries could arrange its affairs so that its income was located in a low-tax location say a Bahamas or a Netherlands Antilles and that its greatest costs were recorded in a high-tax jurisdiction, like Canada. International banks could do something similar. They could book, or register, loans in a low-tax milieu like the Cayman Islands. And they could shift costs and expenses to high-tax locations like Toronto or Montreal. To be sure, Switzerland has long had a unique place in European finance as a place where the rich, the powerful and the persecuted could hide their money. But from a Canadian, and, in fact, a North American perspective, the 1930s saw a regionally significant development the emergence of havens in the Caribbean