Global leak investigations and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have revealed the inner workings of a secret financial system. If we don’t act on what we know, something far worse than secrecy will befall us.

Jake Bernstein is an author, a playwright and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative reporting. He earned his first Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for National Reporting for his coverage of the 2008 financial crisis. He was also the senior reporter on the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) team, which broke the Panama Papers story. In 2017, the same project won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Bernstein’s latest book, The Laundromat, previously published as Secrecy World, was turned into a Netflix film directed by Steven Soderbergh starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, and Jeffrey Wright. Bernstein has been the editor of The Texas Observer and is currently the co-author of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Guardian, ProPublica, and Vice and has appeared on the BBC, NBC, CNN, PBS, and NPR. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx