Right now we are all freaked out about Putin, who is going to invade the US by way of Alaska as soon as he’s done with Ukraine.
The media redirected a reasonable fear of violent crime into a fear of unreported currency transactions, and convinced people that financial privacy is a Bad Thing. The Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 didn’t end money laundering, and certainly did nothing for the War on Drugs. Money Laundering is destroying society! People demanded that the government Do Something, so politicians campaigned on promises to solve this imaginary problem.Īnd that brings us to today. Publish enough scary stories about an imaginary stupid thing, and the plebes will freak out and fall in line. A year later, the number increased to 270,000 reports per month. Other banks wanted to avoid the same hit job and responded accordingly: In 1985, an average of 68,000 currency transaction reports were filed each month. Instead of a minor housekeeping error, the failure to report cash transactions became the equivalent of murdering babies…with drugs. Newspapers went from publishing a few dozen money laundering stories per year, to running 228 stories in 1985. Murder? Gambling? According to the transitive property, the Bank of Boston was responsible for those things. Angiulo transactions had nothing to do with the bank’s felony charge, but the papers were in muckraking mode and every bad thing the Angiulos did became the fault of Boston Bank. The New York Times revealed that members of the Angiulo mobster family were customers of the bank. The punishment reflected the unseriousness of the crime – a $500,000 fine, probably less than a banker’s annual meal allowance. The Bank of Boston was one such sporadic case. Banks regularly ignored them, and regulatory agencies only sporadically prosecuted them.
This was not a big crime transaction reporting requirements had been around since the Prohibition Era. At the peak of the Drug war, an odd scandal transpired where the Bank of Boston was criminally prosecuted for failing to adequately report cash transactions to the IRS. In the 1970s and 80s, the government manufactured a drug crisis and declared a War on Drugs. “Currency” meant that cash was considered in its current state, source of funds notwithstanding 1. What if we’re not doing this to manipulate Russians? What if the purpose of the embargo is to manipulate Americans?įifty years ago, there were no money laundering laws, no concept of clean or “dirty” money. Essentially, we are doing Russia a favor.īut. I mean actual productivity not the bogus ad-driven makework that counts as US GDP these days. What does this accomplish, really? If Netflix and OnlyFans block all Russian users, then worker productivity will surely go up. I’m suspicious of the corporate embargo on Russia.
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