" 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. "<p>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_?
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.
Alternative to archive.ph<p>Disable Javascript and CSS<p>For example<p><pre><code> curl https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions \
|sed '1s/^/<meta http-equiv=content-security-policy content=\"default-src none\">/' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
</code></pre>
There are also Firefox add-ons that can do this as well<p>Or use a text-only browser<p><pre><code> links https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions
links -dump https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/john-lanchester/squillions</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>just</i> come knocking to investigate?<p>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".<p>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.
Actually the privacy legislation in Italy is pretty strong. With the gdpr, banks have more challenges to do what they do with data in the US.
Government might be tracking everybody, the goal of the law for sure is that.<p>It's hard to say what happens with all of that.
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.<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...</a>
Here are the last two sentences:<p>> 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.<p>The last one couldn't be farther from the truth, and the first one couldn't be farther from a lie.
The state's ability to track and criminalize people based on financial behaviors <i>through deputized financial intermediaries</i> is new, and temporary.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>One major and necessary fallacy inside the social graph is that electronic settlement <i>between</i> 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.<p>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.<p><i>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.</i> Removing one capital control, blesses the other.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p><i>All</i> 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.<p>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.<p>Most people <i>want</i> government to be able to seize assets of baddies. It is possible with cash, it is possible with banks, hardly possible with crypto.<p>The technology to scam people at scale with untraceable emoney is not everybody's cup of tea.<p>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.<p>They are also a godsend to current American president which loves a nice side of washed crypto along with all the other theft.<p>It is absolutely possible to like cash and dislike crypto
>Most people want government to be able to seize assets of baddies.<p>I dont, not while they get to decide who the baddies are.
there is high consensus on that, but not high enough to enshrine it into the constitution. in countries with strong rule of law, the courts have continued to uphold this whenever the state gets bold enough to move on a previously tolerated "baddie"<p>capital, as an aggregate expression of people's desires, moves like water. if will flow through any small opening<p>capital controls will flow through any weak link, whether that's a Shanghai free trade zone, a freeport at the airport in JFK or Zurich, physical cash, illiquid assets traded through a trust, or natively in crypto, or crypto wrapped within the same aforementioned structures, no matter what the prevailing or commoner's view is everywhere else in the region<p>even countries that can change on the whims of an all powerful head of state, they don't really mess with the capital because it drives everyone else away and reduces the head of state's own liquidity and economic driver.