The World's New Safe Haven for Private Capital Is Not Where Most People Think

How a quirk of U.S. tax law turned Delaware, South Dakota, and Nevada into destinations for international capital once bound for Zurich and George Town, and why most advisors still can't execute on it.

At a Glance

• $279B. New foreign direct investment, U.S., 2024
• 100+. Countries exchanging data under CRS. Not the U.S.
• $360B. South Dakota trust assets, up 4x in a decade
• $75T. Projected global UHNW wealth by 2035

Executive Summary

International families and their advisors have spent a generation treating Switzerland, Singapore, and the Cayman Islands as the default answer for private wealth structuring. A regulatory asymmetry that has existed since 2014, largely unremarked outside specialist tax and trust circles, has quietly made the United States a more structurally attractive jurisdiction for a meaningful share of that capital. The data below shows the shift is measurable, not anecdotal. The final section shows where most advisory relationships still fail to capture it.

The Transparency Asymmetry

In 2010, the United States enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the most aggressive unilateral financial-transparency law any government had attempted. FATCA compelled foreign banks everywhere to report on American accountholders or lose access to U.S. markets. It worked as designed: the Congressional Research Service has documented a measurable decline in offshore tax evasion by U.S. persons in the years since.

Four years later, the OECD built FATCA's natural sequel: the Common Reporting Standard, a multilateral system under which more than 100 countries now exchange account information automatically and reciprocally with one another. The United States never joined it. Twice, Congress declined to grant Treasury the authority CRS would require, disclosing account balances and beneficial ownership to foreign governments with the same rigor the U.S. now demands of everyone else.

The result is a one-way mirror. The IRS receives detailed data on Americans' assets abroad; most foreign governments receive comparatively little on their own citizens' assets here. The European Union has formally objected to the imbalance, and The Economist has covered it at length. Rothschild & Co. and Trident Trust, among other established fiduciary names, have spent the past decade shifting client relationships out of traditional offshore centers and into Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota, a migration documented in the Pandora Papers investigation and the reporting that followed it.

None of this makes U.S. trust structures secret. In practice, it makes them more private than what most international families were advised to use a generation ago, because the privacy here comes from statute rather than concealment, a distinction most advisors serving this market still fail to draw correctly, in both directions.

The Capital Flow Is Measurable

The United States drew $279 billion in new foreign direct investment in 2024, according to UNCTAD, more than any other country on earth, and close to a fifth of all cross-border capital that moved globally that year.

Real estate carries real weight within that total. Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom alone accounted for more than 40% of foreign real-estate-directed FDI into the U.S. in 2024, according to Commerce Department data compiled by the National Association of Realtors.

The Trust Data Tells the Same Story

In South Dakota, assets under trust administration have more than quadrupled over the past decade to cross $360 billion, according to reporting tied to the ICIJ's Pandora Papers investigation. One firm alone, South Dakota Trust Company, now serves clients from more than fifty countries. Trusts & Estates magazine ranked South Dakota the top U.S. jurisdiction for asset protection across every category it tracks, as of January 2025.

Commercial real estate capital more broadly is following the same trajectory. CBRE forecasts total U.S. CRE investment activity will rise 16% in 2026 to $562 billion, nearly matching the pre-pandemic (2015 to 2019) annual average.

Delaware's Role, and Its Limits

Delaware's place in this story is real, but narrower than its reputation suggests. It is not, strictly, the most aggressive asset-protection jurisdiction in the country. Nevada and South Dakota generally beat it on statute of limitations and creditor exceptions. What Delaware offers instead is two centuries of trust precedent, adjudicated by the Court of Chancery: a specialized, non-jury equity court whose Chancellors and Vice Chancellors are appointed for their expertise and serve twelve-year terms, and for whom trust and fiduciary disputes sit alongside corporate law as core docket, not overflow. Delaware reinforced its bet in July 2026, when its legislature signed the Family Trust Company Act, making it materially easier for high-net-worth families to charter a private trust company of their own under Delaware law.

Where Most Advisory Relationships Fall Short

Trust-law fluency, not the underlying trend, is the actual bottleneck. Plenty of advisors can now recite the FATCA/CRS asymmetry on a client call. Far fewer have ever built the structure underneath it: the correct trust situs, the correct holding-entity layer for U.S. real property, an underwriting relationship on the other end capable of actually sourcing and closing the asset. Knowing why the capital is moving is table stakes. Building the pipeline that moves it, compliantly and with real underwriting behind it, is a different discipline, and it is where most advisory relationships still come up short.

Global private wealth is not waiting for advisors to catch up. PwC projects ultra-high-net-worth assets worldwide will grow from roughly $45 trillion in 2025 to $75 trillion by 2035. The share of that capital already looking toward U.S. structures will keep growing with it. The only open question left is who earns the mandate to execute it, and who is left explaining the trend after the capital has already moved.

Sources: UNCTAD; U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis / U.S. Commerce Department (via National Association of Realtors); Congressional Research Service; International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (Pandora Papers); Trusts & Estates magazine; CBRE Research; PwC Global Family Business and Private Wealth research; Delaware Courts; Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell LLP. Figures noted as estimates are derived from stated growth rates in the cited sources, not independently reported values, and should be verified against primary data before further distribution.