From .coda's Oligarchy newsletter, July, 13:
The eye popping enormity of global money laundering
TBML, IT’S A FOUR-LETTER WORD
Trade-based Money Laundering is a dull name for an alarming concept. In short, it’s the practice of moving illicit wealth around the world in the form of stuff, rather than in the form of money. If you want to move wealth out of a country, you over-pay for imports, or under-bill for exports; if you want to move wealth into a country, you do the opposite. Failing that, you can just settle accounts within two different countries, and balance up by moving goods between them. All these techniques avoid the Financial Intelligence Units that are central to standard anti-money laundering methods.
Expert analysis suggests perhaps four-fifths of all money laundering happens in this way, rather than through financial institutions, but it’s laborious work to spot it so – rather in the manner of the drunk man looking for his keys under the lamp post – we tend to focus on money flows, which can be more easily be analyzed.
According to the analysts at Global Financial Integrity in Washington DC, there was a hole worth $1.6 trillion (that is enough wealth to buy you Google, with enough cash left over to make you one of the richest people on earth) in trade statistics between countries in 2018, which is the most up-to-date year for which figures are available. If even half of that was money laundering, rather than just data entry errors, we are talking about a super-colossal amount of wealth moving around the world undetected....
....MUCH MORE
