I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff.
A few minor comments.
My wife and I have owned and used 1000 CHF notes quite a few times in the past. The last two times we moved apartments I paid part of the moving fee with a 1000 CHF note. We've also bought furniture this way. Nobody was surprised to see this and the notes were accepted without question or comment. To a person who spent their life in Britain this sounds absurd because the British government has - true to form - been trying to wipe cash out for many years to improve surveillance. You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist, because the state assumes that anything it can't see must automatically be suspicious. And there's so much street crime, and the police care so little about burglary, it would be very dangerous to hold such notes. But in Switzerland it's safe and the government doesn't try to wipe cash out, so paying with high value notes is common. (Although bank notes are in no way as private as people assume and can be tracked quite well, because they don't tend to circulate far.) This situation makes a mockery of the recommendation to fight crime by removing high value bank notes. The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.
I looked into the case of George Cottrell once. The case against Cottrell collapsed because it was founded on entrapment (the eight months was a plea deal in the usual American fashion, and doesn't mean much). It boiled down to undercover FBI agents asking Cottrell, "how could we launder money" and he explained how to do it, in the way anyone familiar with the topic could. He didn't make any offers to actually do it, didn't do it, and that's why "could be jailed for up to 20 years" turned into an eight month plea bargain to let prosecutors save face. Then after he was released he trolled US LE by writing a book called "How to launder money". Usually not given is the subtitle: "A guide for law enforcement and politicians". It's not written for criminals but people love to omit that detail.
Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it and fear that by talking about it, they'll just teach more people how to do it. It's an infinite money glitch but in the real world. It's interesting that the UK thinks they solved it. I suspect they didn't, rather, enforcement collapsed elsewhere and it became easier to just go back to other ways of scamming the government.
> The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.
From 18th May:
“A new £30m High Street organised crime unit has been announced by the government after the BBC's year-long investigative reporting into illegal mini-marts, vape shops and barbers.”
> You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist
Yes, although this is mostly by capping the highest regularly circulating note at £50 after the war and then waiting for inflation.
> And there's so much street crime,
[mostly false]
> and the police care so little about burglary,
Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports; there was a joke during the Mandelson scandal that this was the one time the Met had managed to locate a phone)
> The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.
Yes, which makes a sort of orthogonal point about whether or not cash is actually important for this. There's the conspicuously suspicious businesses ("American sweet shops"), but also more complicated stuff going on (Scottish Limited Partnerships were in the news). Then there's all the Crown dependencies, which are a total financial wild west still.
> Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it
God yes. This is a significant problem in VAT as a concept; I don't understand why the EU loves VAT so much.
I'm not suprised that in the swiss economy no one bats an eye at 1000 CHF bank notes. After all the swiss are historically known for being the classy alternative to launder and store your ill gotten gains from, for example, your stint as the dictator of an African country.
But there has been some changes in recent years so I don't know how it is today.
>To a person who spent their life in Britain this sounds absurd because the British government has - true to form - been trying to wipe cash out for many years to improve surveillance.
Oh come of Facebook for christ sake. Absolute hogwash.
Here's an anecdotal thought: AML laws surprisingly work well to discourage offline transactions by tax-paying citizens, helping maximize tax reporting and improve tax collection. As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
It used to be super common for many small businesses to be cash only or a 10% discount for cash. Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance. I haven't seen a cash only business since covid.
With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users, any business that is pulling in huge sums of cash well beyond the average is going to look increasingly suspicious.
> As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
Which creates national security and sovereignty issues. Cash is robust and decentralised. There is a good reason Sweden went from pushing cashless to advising people to keep cash at home for emergencies, and were at least considering an obligation to accept cash for small transactions.
In Italy there is a very aggressive law against money laundering: if you withdraw more than 1k cash, it triggers a call to the police.
I know it's the same if you do it over multiple days.
I think it has been relaxed a little bit later on, but in Italy everybody does the "I'll charge you X less without VAT" (which is 23% in Italy, I should point out), so this is also fighting that.
That wouldn't help in the situations described in the article. For example where individuals buy drugs with small amounts of cash, then that cash is used to buy things like luxury watches and iphones, then those items are taken overseas and sold.
Seemingly the only effective way to solve this would be to ban purchasing highly resellable items with cash and requiring that cash to be deposited in to the system first.
Does that mean it's illegal, or that they'll just come knocking to investigate?
I wonder if the "it's my money, I can withdraw it if I want" argument is good enough to send them on their way? (in addition to $1,000 being such a small amount as to be less-than-trivial when it comes to the overall problem of money laundering).
You mean they implemented laws under the guise of "money laundering".
They just want to track what you spend your money on, that's step one.
Step two is to restrict what you can spend your money on, although this is a partial side effect of part 1.
Aside: The author of this article wrote a fantastic novel that not a lot of people know about called “The Debt to Pleasure”. One of the best instances of the “unreliable narrator” I’ve ever read.
Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get.
Just sentences like this:
> This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...]
So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an article, actually good writing just hits different.
Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef with Amazon, most of his work is not available as an ebook.
" Bullough gives the example of a Mexican drug dealer who smuggles product across the border to the US. The drug in question would once have been marijuana, then cocaine, and is now likely to be fentanyl, which is cheap to manufacture and easy to conceal. The drugs are sold in the US for cash, which is used to buy, say, agricultural equipment. "
Wouldn't the person buying the tractor in the US for $$$ have to show where that money came from? Can you show up to John Deere with over a million dollars _in cash_?
I don't know about the US. The EU limit on cash transactions differs by country, with a legal maximum of 10k€. Belgium and the Netherlands for example are at 3k€.
The short answer is yes. You can buy cars, trucks and tractors for cash. The more expensive the car, the easier it often is. Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash.
> I reckon the luxury watch trade is 80 per cent money laundering
Found this quote interesting given Europes richest person is the head of a luxury brand company.
I always wonder who was buying all this high end stuff - the concentration of wealth has created a more billionaires - but they aren't that many of them and there is only so many watches one person needs.
It also may explain why China is struggling to establish it's own luxury brands - the money laundering prefers that cross border flow.
POSWID* says that money laundering laws are intended mostly to keep the proles and other people within the system honest, while providing a clean and easy system for people with enough money or cachet to bypass it.
I always thought the TV show Ozark was fairly accurate in it's depiction of money laundering. The family would buy a small business that they could inject cash and cook the books with fake sales.
any tips based job; serving/waiting, stripping, bartending, etc. gig/service work. freelancer websites that offer escrow, etc. Shopify. Hell, github sponsorships. You don't even need a physical store these days, or a business for that matter. Cashapp even. The list is endless and it's easier than ever.
Now I just need some dirty money to go through the hassle of cleaning
> Governments don’t do anything about the status quo, for a number of reasons: it inconveniences them to look too deeply into the darker corners of their own financial systems, and they make money from printing their own currencies and don’t much care how that cash is used. But most of all, they don’t do anything about it because they haven’t got a clue.
The last one couldn't be farther from the truth, and the first one couldn't be farther from a lie.
It's very simple, there is more incentive for money laundering than there is fighting it. It's the same reason there are more lawyers working for large companies vs small guys. The invisible hand that determines the structure of our society.
Seems like the reason Australia dragged its heels on AML changes for property purchases. Propping the property market up was more important than stopping crime.
The state's ability to track and criminalize people based on financial behaviors through deputized financial intermediaries is new, and temporary.
Outside of this social graph, where private cash transactions still exist, the state lacks power and relies on stigmatizing cash ownership, consumption, movement. This stigma is largely successful and ubiquitous but inconsequential to anybody that matters or has a lawyer of their own.
Electronic settlement of funds since the 1970s has allowed for the state to leverage financial institutions for records and enforcement. Electronic settlement without institutions since the 2010s removes that power from the government and is merely a reversion to the mean. Any delay in the prevalence of this is both user-error, social stigma, and a government's unfamiliarity with the reality that their own constitutions and documents that organize the state are things that have to be updated to actually remove an expectation of privacy from finance.
> We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past.
One major and necessary fallacy inside the social graph is that electronic settlement between institutions assumes that the deputized institutions have blessed the funds and user as not money laundered. Only the user and who they transact with can trigger an investigation by the government at this point, by reporting the money for taxes or in a large withdrawal to cash out of the social graph, without further laundering it. This user error is mostly mitigated as soon as cross border payments are done, because the next financial institution doubly assumes funds from another country's banks are clean. The banks and sovereignty become the washing machine inside the electronic settlement system.
This is doubly important to realize, because it's the tip of the iceberg in brand sovereignty. One country's illegality is not another country's illegality.
You can't simultaneously be for a stigma against withdrawing large amounts of cash, while considering the Communist Party's capital controls to be oppressive. Removing one capital control, blesses the other.
This is a blind spot for most people, since they don't consider them to be the same things, but fortunately this cognitive dissonance highlights the reality. It is impossible to completely stigmatize and the capital routes around the stigma and all capital controls, unless the entire world is under a single totalitarian regime.
All while only the edges, moving between physical cash and electronic system, and moving cash between borders and the electronic system, are policed, in what could really only be the ultimate hubris of expecting the state to be involved at all.
And it's not just cash. Its assets too. The state is hoping for titled and electronic settlement of assets. In the last 30 years a systematic global dismantling of explicit "bearer assets" has been done, when the bearer assets were offered by the state. But this is also unsuccessful, as since the 2010s, the bearer assets created and settled without a financial intermediary have existed and been wildly popular.
All capital controls have been obsoleted while they were never fully implemented to begin with. No matter whether that's the idea of your neighbor holding a lot of physical cash, or a subject of the Communist Party in another country circumventing capital controls you consider oppressive.
This article covers the same points with a wildly contrived conclusion: To attempt to change anything in favor of the state being more effective at enforcing its invented crime of money laundering instead of curbing the actual illicit behaviors. For reasons that are assumed and unexplained, so it's impossible for me to change my view on. My view is simple - capital controls are dead and a waste of time. The article and both books it references actually agree on that. My other view is that the state should just do classic investigative work on illegal behaviors which means finding the people involved and subpoena-ing them, something it seems to have forgotten how to do in favor of relying on deputized intermediaries who are temporary, ineffective, and inconvenience just the law abiding.
Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC.
Most people want government to be able to seize assets of baddies. It is possible with cash, it is possible with banks, hardly possible with crypto.
The technology to scam people at scale with untraceable emoney is not everybody's cup of tea.
Speaking from a country that invaded its neighbor, for our government (as well as north korea) it is lovely to have a way around sanctions. Libertarian crypto bros of the west are a godsend.
They are also a godsend to current American president which loves a nice side of washed crypto along with all the other theft.
It is absolutely possible to like cash and dislike crypto
First off, money laundering does not require cash. So the premise is a bit strange.
Second, I submit that money laundering should not be considered a crime at all. Monitoring it (for example, banks required to report large cash transactions to the government) just leads to mass surveillance of innocent people.
Transferring money from A to B - why should that be a crime? The point of anti-money-laundering laws is that the money generated at point A may have been generated illegally. It isn't the money transfer that is the problem, it is the illegal activity. The police need to put in the effort to prosecute that illegal activity.
This is reminiscent of the continual pressure to break end-to-end encryption. The police want an easy way to do their (admittedly difficult) job. But the price is just too high: mass surveillance, and many false positives, affecting the general populace.
AML laws enforce monitoring so that legitimate businesses have to block or report activity, assisting law enforcement in tracing said criminal activity. It's the most effective way. As the famous saying goes: follow the money.
You're correct on the privacy implications. It's shocking how much data AML monitoring companies have collected about you, there's more data points than any single person could think up. These aren't entities owned by the government - they're private companies.
Also yes money laundering does not require cash but I think the author is highlighting the scale of it. Most countries tax consumption a.k.a VAT and 'hidden transactions' such as cash transactions bypass that.
You can be anti-anti-money-laundering but then you also either have to be a complete anarchist or completely anti-taxation and anti-data-collection by corporations and yet still have a reasonable argument for how this will result in the ability for society to have a government.
I'm not saying the system is perfect - far from any means. However the utopia you describe seems infeasible to me.
The true crime is involving a multinational corporation in a transaction between two private individuals at the local market.
I like cash because it's direct, and where possible I avoid paying by card because I don't want the merchant to pay fees to third parties.
In Europe, most of the time, using cash doesn't imply avoiding taxes on the transaction, but having cash is essentially sovereignty.
FYI, handling cash has fees to "third parties" too.
In a lot of cases it's a lot higher than just taking card.
I learned a lot about the AML system many years ago and still have some books about how it works on my bookshelf. It's fascinating stuff.
A few minor comments.
My wife and I have owned and used 1000 CHF notes quite a few times in the past. The last two times we moved apartments I paid part of the moving fee with a 1000 CHF note. We've also bought furniture this way. Nobody was surprised to see this and the notes were accepted without question or comment. To a person who spent their life in Britain this sounds absurd because the British government has - true to form - been trying to wipe cash out for many years to improve surveillance. You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist, because the state assumes that anything it can't see must automatically be suspicious. And there's so much street crime, and the police care so little about burglary, it would be very dangerous to hold such notes. But in Switzerland it's safe and the government doesn't try to wipe cash out, so paying with high value notes is common. (Although bank notes are in no way as private as people assume and can be tracked quite well, because they don't tend to circulate far.) This situation makes a mockery of the recommendation to fight crime by removing high value bank notes. The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.
I looked into the case of George Cottrell once. The case against Cottrell collapsed because it was founded on entrapment (the eight months was a plea deal in the usual American fashion, and doesn't mean much). It boiled down to undercover FBI agents asking Cottrell, "how could we launder money" and he explained how to do it, in the way anyone familiar with the topic could. He didn't make any offers to actually do it, didn't do it, and that's why "could be jailed for up to 20 years" turned into an eight month plea bargain to let prosecutors save face. Then after he was released he trolled US LE by writing a book called "How to launder money". Usually not given is the subtitle: "A guide for law enforcement and politicians". It's not written for criminals but people love to omit that detail.
Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it and fear that by talking about it, they'll just teach more people how to do it. It's an infinite money glitch but in the real world. It's interesting that the UK thinks they solved it. I suspect they didn't, rather, enforcement collapsed elsewhere and it became easier to just go back to other ways of scamming the government.
> The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.
From 18th May:
“A new £30m High Street organised crime unit has been announced by the government after the BBC's year-long investigative reporting into illegal mini-marts, vape shops and barbers.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3pzwx449no
Of course, remains to be seen what, if any, impact this ends up having.
> You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist
Yes, although this is mostly by capping the highest regularly circulating note at £50 after the war and then waiting for inflation.
> And there's so much street crime,
[mostly false]
> and the police care so little about burglary,
Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports; there was a joke during the Mandelson scandal that this was the one time the Met had managed to locate a phone)
> The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.
Yes, which makes a sort of orthogonal point about whether or not cash is actually important for this. There's the conspicuously suspicious businesses ("American sweet shops"), but also more complicated stuff going on (Scottish Limited Partnerships were in the news). Then there's all the Crown dependencies, which are a total financial wild west still.
> Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it
God yes. This is a significant problem in VAT as a concept; I don't understand why the EU loves VAT so much.
I'm not suprised that in the swiss economy no one bats an eye at 1000 CHF bank notes. After all the swiss are historically known for being the classy alternative to launder and store your ill gotten gains from, for example, your stint as the dictator of an African country.
But there has been some changes in recent years so I don't know how it is today.
>To a person who spent their life in Britain this sounds absurd because the British government has - true to form - been trying to wipe cash out for many years to improve surveillance.
Oh come of Facebook for christ sake. Absolute hogwash.
How can one write about money laundering without talking about crypto currencies ?
Here's an anecdotal thought: AML laws surprisingly work well to discourage offline transactions by tax-paying citizens, helping maximize tax reporting and improve tax collection. As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
It used to be super common for many small businesses to be cash only or a 10% discount for cash. Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance. I haven't seen a cash only business since covid.
With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users, any business that is pulling in huge sums of cash well beyond the average is going to look increasingly suspicious.
> As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
Which creates national security and sovereignty issues. Cash is robust and decentralised. There is a good reason Sweden went from pushing cashless to advising people to keep cash at home for emergencies, and were at least considering an obligation to accept cash for small transactions.
In Italy there is a very aggressive law against money laundering: if you withdraw more than 1k cash, it triggers a call to the police. I know it's the same if you do it over multiple days.
I think it has been relaxed a little bit later on, but in Italy everybody does the "I'll charge you X less without VAT" (which is 23% in Italy, I should point out), so this is also fighting that.
In other words, the Italian police are flooded with more reports than they could possibly investigate.
That wouldn't help in the situations described in the article. For example where individuals buy drugs with small amounts of cash, then that cash is used to buy things like luxury watches and iphones, then those items are taken overseas and sold.
Seemingly the only effective way to solve this would be to ban purchasing highly resellable items with cash and requiring that cash to be deposited in to the system first.
Does that mean it's illegal, or that they'll just come knocking to investigate?
I wonder if the "it's my money, I can withdraw it if I want" argument is good enough to send them on their way? (in addition to $1,000 being such a small amount as to be less-than-trivial when it comes to the overall problem of money laundering).
withdrew 2-4k rent for a few months in 23 and never saw any cops.
You mean they implemented laws under the guise of "money laundering".
They just want to track what you spend your money on, that's step one. Step two is to restrict what you can spend your money on, although this is a partial side effect of part 1.
Aside: The author of this article wrote a fantastic novel that not a lot of people know about called “The Debt to Pleasure”. One of the best instances of the “unreliable narrator” I’ve ever read.
Good to know, thanks! This article was such a breath of fresh air compared to the usual "LLM-assisted" writing you get.
Just sentences like this:
> This isn’t just a problem for far-off countries of which we know little, like the EU and the US and China. Here in the UK [...]
So good! I feel like I'm becoming an old cynic but if it's the tenth time on the day that I read an overdramatized "It's not X, it is Y" in an article, actually good writing just hits different.
Phenomenal author indeed. "Capital", a novel about the financial crisis and bankers on the hedonic treadmill, is wonderful too. Too bad either Lanchester or his publisher has beef with Amazon, most of his work is not available as an ebook.
" Bullough gives the example of a Mexican drug dealer who smuggles product across the border to the US. The drug in question would once have been marijuana, then cocaine, and is now likely to be fentanyl, which is cheap to manufacture and easy to conceal. The drugs are sold in the US for cash, which is used to buy, say, agricultural equipment. "
Wouldn't the person buying the tractor in the US for $$$ have to show where that money came from? Can you show up to John Deere with over a million dollars _in cash_?
I don't know about the US. The EU limit on cash transactions differs by country, with a legal maximum of 10k€. Belgium and the Netherlands for example are at 3k€.
The short answer is yes. You can buy cars, trucks and tractors for cash. The more expensive the car, the easier it often is. Luxury cars in particular are routinely bought and sold for cash.
All of Bullough's books are worth your time and variously go deeper into this very subject.
> I reckon the luxury watch trade is 80 per cent money laundering
Found this quote interesting given Europes richest person is the head of a luxury brand company.
I always wonder who was buying all this high end stuff - the concentration of wealth has created a more billionaires - but they aren't that many of them and there is only so many watches one person needs.
It also may explain why China is struggling to establish it's own luxury brands - the money laundering prefers that cross border flow.
Unrelated, but I love finding lower-case numbers in the wild!
(Note the two and the zeros in “$20 billion to $80 billion.”)
These are called text figures, as opposed to lining figures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures
POSWID* says that money laundering laws are intended mostly to keep the proles and other people within the system honest, while providing a clean and easy system for people with enough money or cachet to bypass it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I always thought the TV show Ozark was fairly accurate in it's depiction of money laundering. The family would buy a small business that they could inject cash and cook the books with fake sales.
any tips based job; serving/waiting, stripping, bartending, etc. gig/service work. freelancer websites that offer escrow, etc. Shopify. Hell, github sponsorships. You don't even need a physical store these days, or a business for that matter. Cashapp even. The list is endless and it's easier than ever.
Now I just need some dirty money to go through the hassle of cleaning
Here are the last two sentences:
> Governments don’t do anything about the status quo, for a number of reasons: it inconveniences them to look too deeply into the darker corners of their own financial systems, and they make money from printing their own currencies and don’t much care how that cash is used. But most of all, they don’t do anything about it because they haven’t got a clue.
The last one couldn't be farther from the truth, and the first one couldn't be farther from a lie.
It's very simple, there is more incentive for money laundering than there is fighting it. It's the same reason there are more lawyers working for large companies vs small guys. The invisible hand that determines the structure of our society.
Seems like the reason Australia dragged its heels on AML changes for property purchases. Propping the property market up was more important than stopping crime.
In war the side that knows what they are fighting for generally wins.
The state's ability to track and criminalize people based on financial behaviors through deputized financial intermediaries is new, and temporary.
Outside of this social graph, where private cash transactions still exist, the state lacks power and relies on stigmatizing cash ownership, consumption, movement. This stigma is largely successful and ubiquitous but inconsequential to anybody that matters or has a lawyer of their own.
Electronic settlement of funds since the 1970s has allowed for the state to leverage financial institutions for records and enforcement. Electronic settlement without institutions since the 2010s removes that power from the government and is merely a reversion to the mean. Any delay in the prevalence of this is both user-error, social stigma, and a government's unfamiliarity with the reality that their own constitutions and documents that organize the state are things that have to be updated to actually remove an expectation of privacy from finance.
> We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past.
One major and necessary fallacy inside the social graph is that electronic settlement between institutions assumes that the deputized institutions have blessed the funds and user as not money laundered. Only the user and who they transact with can trigger an investigation by the government at this point, by reporting the money for taxes or in a large withdrawal to cash out of the social graph, without further laundering it. This user error is mostly mitigated as soon as cross border payments are done, because the next financial institution doubly assumes funds from another country's banks are clean. The banks and sovereignty become the washing machine inside the electronic settlement system.
This is doubly important to realize, because it's the tip of the iceberg in brand sovereignty. One country's illegality is not another country's illegality.
You can't simultaneously be for a stigma against withdrawing large amounts of cash, while considering the Communist Party's capital controls to be oppressive. Removing one capital control, blesses the other.
This is a blind spot for most people, since they don't consider them to be the same things, but fortunately this cognitive dissonance highlights the reality. It is impossible to completely stigmatize and the capital routes around the stigma and all capital controls, unless the entire world is under a single totalitarian regime.
All while only the edges, moving between physical cash and electronic system, and moving cash between borders and the electronic system, are policed, in what could really only be the ultimate hubris of expecting the state to be involved at all.
And it's not just cash. Its assets too. The state is hoping for titled and electronic settlement of assets. In the last 30 years a systematic global dismantling of explicit "bearer assets" has been done, when the bearer assets were offered by the state. But this is also unsuccessful, as since the 2010s, the bearer assets created and settled without a financial intermediary have existed and been wildly popular.
All capital controls have been obsoleted while they were never fully implemented to begin with. No matter whether that's the idea of your neighbor holding a lot of physical cash, or a subject of the Communist Party in another country circumventing capital controls you consider oppressive.
This article covers the same points with a wildly contrived conclusion: To attempt to change anything in favor of the state being more effective at enforcing its invented crime of money laundering instead of curbing the actual illicit behaviors. For reasons that are assumed and unexplained, so it's impossible for me to change my view on. My view is simple - capital controls are dead and a waste of time. The article and both books it references actually agree on that. My other view is that the state should just do classic investigative work on illegal behaviors which means finding the people involved and subpoena-ing them, something it seems to have forgotten how to do in favor of relying on deputized intermediaries who are temporary, ineffective, and inconvenience just the law abiding.
Where cash is stigmatized? I haven't seen such a place except PRC.
Most people want government to be able to seize assets of baddies. It is possible with cash, it is possible with banks, hardly possible with crypto.
The technology to scam people at scale with untraceable emoney is not everybody's cup of tea.
Speaking from a country that invaded its neighbor, for our government (as well as north korea) it is lovely to have a way around sanctions. Libertarian crypto bros of the west are a godsend.
They are also a godsend to current American president which loves a nice side of washed crypto along with all the other theft.
It is absolutely possible to like cash and dislike crypto
Alternative to archive.ph
Disable Javascript and CSS
For example
There are also Firefox add-ons that can do this as wellOr use a text-only browser
BPWC is good as well, but I would keep it in a separate browser profile.
In this day and age "money laundering" just means "not bending over and letting the state tax you to oblivion". TFA is just scare mongering.
People need to learn about Bitcoin.
You might want to check out Monero. It's like Bitcoin but actually usable for purchases. And it's private.
> People need to learn about Bitcoin.
Indeed. Bitcoin is now a major player in the money laundering business. NFTs are so much better than fake pocelain!
First off, money laundering does not require cash. So the premise is a bit strange.
Second, I submit that money laundering should not be considered a crime at all. Monitoring it (for example, banks required to report large cash transactions to the government) just leads to mass surveillance of innocent people.
Transferring money from A to B - why should that be a crime? The point of anti-money-laundering laws is that the money generated at point A may have been generated illegally. It isn't the money transfer that is the problem, it is the illegal activity. The police need to put in the effort to prosecute that illegal activity.
This is reminiscent of the continual pressure to break end-to-end encryption. The police want an easy way to do their (admittedly difficult) job. But the price is just too high: mass surveillance, and many false positives, affecting the general populace.
AML laws enforce monitoring so that legitimate businesses have to block or report activity, assisting law enforcement in tracing said criminal activity. It's the most effective way. As the famous saying goes: follow the money.
You're correct on the privacy implications. It's shocking how much data AML monitoring companies have collected about you, there's more data points than any single person could think up. These aren't entities owned by the government - they're private companies.
Also yes money laundering does not require cash but I think the author is highlighting the scale of it. Most countries tax consumption a.k.a VAT and 'hidden transactions' such as cash transactions bypass that.
You can be anti-anti-money-laundering but then you also either have to be a complete anarchist or completely anti-taxation and anti-data-collection by corporations and yet still have a reasonable argument for how this will result in the ability for society to have a government.
I'm not saying the system is perfect - far from any means. However the utopia you describe seems infeasible to me.