There is now a recurring kind of event that did not exist a generation ago. A very large body of documents is taken from a financial or professional intermediary and released, and within it are the private arrangements of a great many people who had every expectation that those arrangements would remain private.

These releases have a particular character. They are not a single record about a single person. They are entire archives, and once published they are organised, indexed and made searchable, so that anyone can look up a name and see what the archive held. They do not fade. A release from years ago remains as accessible as the day it appeared.

For a person of means this changes the nature of exposure in an important way. A person can be entirely careful in their own conduct, disclose nothing, and still appear in such an archive, because the exposure did not originate with them. It originated with an intermediary they relied upon. The care taken by an individual and the security of the firm holding their information are two separate things, and the second is not within the individual's control.

It also changes the time horizon. An arrangement entered into long ago, entirely properly, sits in the records of the firms involved for as long as those firms keep records. If one of those firms is ever the source of a release, the arrangement becomes visible long after it was made, and long after anyone expected it to be of interest.

The conclusion is not that intermediaries should not be used. They are necessary. It is that a person's exposure cannot be assessed by looking only at the person.

It has to include the question of who else holds information about them, what that information is, and where it would surface if it ever did. Exposure held by others is still exposure. It is simply harder to see, which is precisely why it has to be looked for.