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| The Money Lender and His Wife (detail) by Quentin Massys |
Money Laundering: the process of taking the proceeds of criminal activity and making them seem legal.
By criminal activity authorities mean drugs & armaments trafficking; human, human organs and antiques trafficking; prostitution, illegal gaming, kidnapping, blackmail, robbery, fraud, embezzlement, extortion and (the hot topic of the first decade of the 21st century) terrorism.
Some add “tax evasion” to the list however many find it debatable.
The money laundering paranoia began when a group of illuminated regulators believed that the best way to fight crime is to hit criminals where it hurts them most: money. Then, perhaps, they’d eventually stop committing crimes. However, they haven’t stopped and money keeps being laundered.
Interesting how Men set themselves out to design regulations while overlooking several aspects of human nature (e.g.: human creativity for both good and bad).
Certainly crimes must be fought against and punished; but I am not sure if anti-money laundering laws are the best way to do it; specially when these laws sound more like a pretext to violate banking secrecy (meaning that one’s personal banking information could be subject to being shared at the request of authorities) even if/when one does not partake in criminal activity.
Authorities (in EU, for instance) have decided that one person cannot deposit more than €15,000 in a day (it’s considered money laundering); they have also decided how much a person should have at home (which is not only an absurd but also proof that lawmakers attempt to violate people’s liberties); they have decided that banks are the main source of money laundering and so they force these institutions to not only interrogate potential clients but mostly to rat on their customers – and what is more interesting is if customers decide to take all their money from the banking system (to either protect their privacy or protest against the whole financial system or even sabotage banking institutions) and keep it at home they would probably be committing a crime: money laundering (assuming that they have a comfortable account and/or savings account).
Financial institutions are not subsidiaries of security forces. They can’t nor should do police work, cause doing so will eventually backlash: money will stop flowing affecting, thus, economies around the world.
What happens when governments launder money? I mean, there are times when governments commit what is perceived as crimes (sale of weaponry to undesirable nations; sale of drugs; kidnapping, prostitution, extortion, blackmail etc) and then actually create front businesses, and invest in legit corporations, to make it all legal...so, what happens then? Nothing because it is considered a perpetrated evil for the greater good; meanwhile, the main shareholders of these governments (i.e. tax payers) become targets of a new entity of persecution: the Financial Inquisition.
Interestingly enough, the only activity that is not consensually accepted as money laundering is tax evasion; which, in my opinion, constitutes the biggest financial crime of them all.
Money laundering is a global business of between $590Bn and $1.5Tn: do you think that linear regulations will make it go away?
