Attention, fashion and false consensus

One of the pitfalls of growing old is that one is often befuddled by the modern world.

So it is with the reaction to the Intelligence Select Committee's report on Russian influence on UK politics. This has highlighted the fact that Russian oligarchs are using London to launder their dirty reputations and dirty money.

But, I splutter, we've all known this for ages, even decades: I've been referring to Chelsea "Football" Club as the money launders for years.

In fact, I have a similar reaction to many things. For example, several tenets of MMT - that sectoral balances matter, that its is banks that create money out of nothing, and that there's no financial constraint on government borrowing - strike me as old hat*.

Equally, talk of heterodox economics such as the work of Kalecki, Robinson and Sraffa is for me like hearing Mel & Kim: both provoke happy memories of things I'd half-forgotten from the 80s.

The same's true of behavioural economics. I first came across this back in 1986 when I read Loomes and Sugden's paper on regret theory, published in 1982 (too early to be webbed!). And I read Kahneman and Tversky's collection of papers, Judgment Under Uncertainty in the early 90s - and even then I was late to the party, as it was published in 1982. And yet I'm still surprised when people sometimes treat behavioural economics as something new and radical.

In all these ways, I'm often baffled by folks telling me what I thought I've known for years.

What's going on here?

One possibility is that it corroborates Max Planck's saying: science advances one funeral at a time. Heterodox and behavioural economics might be old but they've been resisted by the neoclassical economic establishment for years - an establishment which (re)gained dominance from the 1980s onwards. It's only as its influence has waned that alternative ideas have begun to blossom (again). Economic ideas are prone to fashions, which come and go.

Another possibility, is that attention, like most other things, is a scarce resource. We therefore conserve it by not paying attention to some things.

In the case of Russian money-laundering, this lack of attention was of course incentivized - by sticks as well as carrots.

But our attention ebbs and flows without external incentives. From the early 90s until 2010 we didn't need to think much about fiscal policy because it wasn't egregiously terrible, at least in the UK. It's only when the disaster of austerity began that we needed to think again about fiscal policy, which led some to discover and rehash the ideas of Keynes, Kalecki, Lerner and Beveridge.

Similarly, neoclassical DSGE models were tolerable during the "Great Moderation" but came into question after the 2008 crisis - especially as that crisis came just five years after Robert Lucas (the father of the new neoclassicism) declared (pdf) that "the central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes."

Maybe, though, there's something else. I've been stupid. I have systematically committed an error of judgement. This is the false consensus effect, a tendency to over-estimate the extent to which other people think like ourselves. My surprise at people discovering Russian money-laundering, MMT, or behavioural economics is like Remainers being surprised by the Brexit vote because nobody they knew supported Leave**.
Which. I suspect, contains two messages.

One is that there is a danger that the behavioural economics and cognitive biases project makes the same error as Homer Simpson: "everyone is stupid except me". (In the case of the nudge agenda, this isn't a danger but a reality.) In truth, though, the projects should warn us that we are all prone to errors of judgement.

Mere knowledge of cognitive biases, however, is not sufficient guard against them: I've known about the false consensus effect for years, but that hasn't stopped me falling into the trap. Bill Shankly had a brilliant insight when he told a young player: "the trouble with you son is that your brains are all in your head." Mere head-knowledge is sometimes not enough. Rational thinking requires habits and, failing that, institutions that promote good thinking and select against bad - institutions we don't possess.

* I've no big issue with most of MMT's ideas. Many of its advocates, however, remind me of Sellars and Yeatman's view of the roundheads - right but repulsive: longwinded fanatical sectarians.

* It's also for this reason that people feel an urge to confess their crimes: they suspect that others know they've done it and want to unburden themselves. The Catholic Church hasn't survived 2000 years without a keen grasp of psychology.

Comments

[Lee]

The leaders of USA, UK and Russia decided that Brexit must happen. So a bit black propaganda against the EU.
What a landslide for them. Closest draw. I have seen.
TM brazens it out with, brexit means brexit.
They didn't needed it investigated. It suited.

[Postkey]

“This paper has suggested a simple model that can account for the key anomalies of the traditional monetary approach. It disaggregates the quantity of credit into a 'real' and a financial circulation. In time periods, when the ratio of credit in the financial circulation to credit in the real circulation rises, the simple quantity theory must be expected to disappoint, as it is a special case of the more general quantity theorem of disaggregated credit. In such time periods, a financial boom is likely, as asset prices are driven up by speculative borrowing on the back of collateralised assets. This explains why the traditional monetary quantity theory was not popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then the traditionally defined velocity of money declines and excess credit creation can 'spill over' as foreign investment. However, during time periods such as the 1950s, when in many countries credit was mainly channeled into the real economy, asset prices remained stable and the traditional quantity theory could be expected to hold. The fact that the model can account for the major anomalies observed in many countries over many time periods demonstrates generality and robustness. “
https://eprints.soton.ac.usk/3Velocity6569/1/KK_97_Disaggregated_Credit.pdf

“One of the best accounts is to be found in Keynes’s 1930 Treatise on Money, which differentiates between transactions in “the industrial circulation” (roughly speaking, those in the income–expenditure–output circular flow) and “the financial circulation” (which can be interpreted as transactions in titles to existing assets).18 As Keynes realized almost 90 years ago, the value of total transactions in an advanced economy is vast, being a multiple both of national income and of transactions involving the extension of new bank credit.19 Given the insignificance of new bank credit relative to the value of transactions, the fame accorded to Bernanke because of his allegedly important research on the “credit channel” must be seen as an aspect of wider bewilderment about these topics.20”

https://mv-pt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/mgr.02-Chapter-2-Congdon.pdf

[Roy Lonergan]

You’ve missed out an asterisk on the Catholic footnote.

For your penance, two Our Fathers, 5 Hail Marys, and a decade of the Rosary.

[ltr]

Oh dear, I am lost. Whatever is this sort of sociology essay about? As for the Russians, if that is the point, is there any thing they can't make the British do? I would have thought it was the Americans who were the dominant influence in Britain, but evidently I would have been wrong. Now, I imagine the influence will be the (shudder) Chinese.

[Aaron Healy]

The link in "sticks" from "by sticks as well as carrots" should be "https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43299598"; a space (%20) was appended inadvertently (one hopes).

[Ralph Musgrave]

Re Chris’s claim that MMT is all old hat, we are often amused by this claim in MMT circles because often as not it turns out that those making that claim were not, five or ten years ago, agreeing with MMT at all.

Quite the opposite: they were making claims that contradict MMT claims. I.e. their claim to have agreed with MMT propositions all along is a bit like the thousands of French people who claimed to have opposed the aristocracy all along after it was clear who was winning the French revolution.

Chris is not entirely innocent here. After one minute’s Googling I found a claim by Chris in 2010 that public debt is a burden on future generations: a claim which is anathema to MMTers. That idea is only valid to the extent that govt debt is held by foreigners who subsequently want their stock of debt repaid with a view to taking the money elsewhere in the World, which some of them never will. See his point No.2 here:

https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2010/08/public-debt-the-left.html

[Richard]

I think there is a relationship with the tendency, bemoaned by many historians I know, for people to talk about slavery, colonialism, segregation etc etc as "things they don't teach you in school" when they are all demonstrably part of the curriculum. For a certain type of person they vanity won't let them admit "I was taught this but I didn't care and so forgot" (which is nothing terrible to admit honestly) and so need to pretend it was hidden from them, or even unknown to anyone. And this type of person, who pride themselves on knowingness, are obviously over represented in professions like the media where one talks for a living.

[Andy]

Good find Ralph Musgrave. Simon Wren-Lewis does a similar act of saying "What's new about MMT?" when he infact held diametrically opposite views previously.

[Dipper]

Oh here we go again with the Dirty Russian Money in London claim.

Estonia Branch. Danske Bank. 200,000,000,000€. Using Scottish Limited Partnerships as a vehicle for anonymity.

I'm going to have to get this printed on a tee-shirt.

For anyone unfamiliar with the city of London, all staff, all organisations, have to undergo anti-money laundering training every year. Individuals are personally liable for breaches of regulations on their watch.

So if anyone ever finds themselves typing the words 'London Laundromat', or 'Dirty Russian Money in London', please stop and come up with the cases. Because, as I am sick of saying, there is a very big case, over there in Estonia, in the EU, which we know about, so if Dirty Russians is your thing, why don't you start there, with something we know, instead of going 'wwooo evasion conspiracy influence wooo' about London with a distinct lack of any actual evidence.

[John]

"That idea is only valid to the extent that govt debt is held by foreigners who subsequently want their stock of debt repaid with a view to taking the money elsewhere in the World, which some of them never will."

Two questions - what is the extent? and why is it only foreigners who might want to take the money elsewhere in the world (or why does this not matter if it is natives who want to)?

[boyo]

@ Dipper, a list of Russian companies listed in London for you:

https://topforeignstocks.com/listed-companies-lists/the-complete-list-of-russian-companies-listed-on-london-stock-exchange/

You can do your own google search to establish the way in which those companies were acquired by their pre-IPO owners.

[Paulc156]

@Dipper deploys the whataboutery defence? "Its happened in the Baltics!!!"

Until Chinese moved in Russian oligarchs were largest purchasers of high end real estate in London and home counties. Much of it purchased in name of shell companies which will often be registered offshore. This is the case for dirty money flooding in from every continent not just Russia. It oils the wheels. And huge swathes of British business is not even touched by anti laundering regs(private education, architects and interior designers, and public relations to name but a few).

The National Crime Agency estimates that hundreds of billions of pounds of dirty money flow through the City each year despite obligations on banks to prevent such flows.And when you consider that the recent attempts to choke off these potentially illicit flows are in effect sub contracted to bank CEOs like HSBC's who agreed to pay a record $1.9bn fine to US authorities in 2012 after allowing drug cartels and terrorists to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through its US branches... you wouldnt expect the international criminal fraternity to be shaking in their boots!

[Dipper]

@Paulc156

"The National Crime Agency estimates that hundreds of billions of pounds of dirty money flow through the City each year despite obligations on banks to prevent such flows."

Really? So how come they aren't putting anyone away for it? Are they just useless? Or is this a classic demand for more money?

Amazingly convenient for everyone isn't it, this wave of crime without any actual criminals anywhere.

[ltr]

Dipper:

Oh here we go again with the Dirty Russian Money in London claim...

[ Perfect and important response. ]

[Dipper]

"And huge swathes of British business is not even touched by anti laundering regs(private education, architects and interior designers, and public relations to name but a few)."

Seriously you think Russians just march into these offices and put large bags of cash down? No-one is going to touch large amounts of cash. Everything has to go through a bank, and it is at the bank account level that the controls work. so perhaps someone from the NCA or elsewhere could identify the dodgy banks being used.

[Paulc156]

@Dipper."Amazingly convenient for everyone isn't it, this wave of crime without any actual criminals anywhere"

Not sure whether you're just being disingenuous or obtuse. Last year, the House of Commons Treasury Committee reported that the “scale of money laundering impacting the UK annually could be in the hundreds of billions of pounds” and that committee was chock full of conservatives. The money floods in from all directions but youd need to be seriously naive or plain obtuse to assume a good amount of it didn't originate from Russian oligarchs and gangsters.

The same committee reported "Accountancy services have also been exploited to provide a veneer of legitimacy to falsified accounts or documents used to conceal the source of funds”. It adds that “Some of those accountants involved in money laundering cases are assessed to be complicit or wilfully blind to money laundering risks”.

The report says that “law enforcement agencies have observed accountants reviewing and signing off accounts for businesses engaged in criminality, thereby facilitating the laundering of the proceeds”. The report provides case studies to show that accountants supervised by professional bodies are engaged in money laundering.

The structures set up to investigate potential laundering etc are not fit for purpose. The UK has around 25 separate regulators dealing with money laundering. These include the Financial Conduct Authority, HMRC, the Gambling Commission and 22 accountancy and legal trade associations! They excel at buck-passing, use different benchmarks, priorities and interpretations of law and related guidance.

As to why the regulatory regime is so hopeless? It was thus designed to be. See linky below.

A world fit for money laundering: the Atlantic alliance’s undermining of organized crime control :
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12117-020-09386-8

Furthermore we know that Banks themselves are amongst the most fraudulent and corrupt of all sectors. Would a long list of their illicit activities suffice? Ranging from vast mis-selling scandals to defraud the general public to in your face laundering activities and tax evasion on behalf of high net worth clients. Activities involving hundreds of billions of pounds. These crimes are committed by our high st banks across the globe. The same banks that are supposed to police the money launderers.

I mean just where have you been hiding out?

[ltr]

The money floods in from all directions but you'd need to be seriously naive or plain obtuse to assume a good amount of it didn't originate from Russian oligarchs and gangsters....

[ My, my. So evidently every person in Britain knows there is rampant money laundering going on, especially money washed by those awful Russians, but British law enforcement is powerless or possibly unwilling to, like, enforce the law.

How British, or whatever? ]

[ltr]

The money floods in from all directions but you'd need to be seriously naive or plain obtuse to assume a good amount of it didn't originate from Russian oligarchs and gangsters....

[ Britain, the lawless? ]

[PeteW]

There are no successful prosecutions of banks or companies for money laundering because England does not prosecute them.

Despite this, they have paid out billions in penalties and fines.

https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/money-laundering-why-the-uk-does-not-prosecute-it/

I read Chris's excellent blog to learn things and (very occasionally) join in a useful debate. But some of his more persistent recent commenters really should refrain from making forceful and assertive comments on subjects they seem to know almost nothing about. It's boring and pointlessly argumentative.

[ltr]

Thank you, Pete W:

https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/money-laundering-why-the-uk-does-not-prosecute-it/

May 7, 2019

Light touch regulation – the UK’s forte.

Despite official acknowledgement of the problem, recent figures show that the UK’s regulator for the financial sector, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which has primary responsibility for prosecuting money laundering, only opened 24 investigations into companies for breaches of the UK’s Money Laundering Regulations (MLR) since 2007 and has brought zero prosecutions.

In the past five years, the FCA imposed regulatory fines on just seven banks for money laundering failures, totalling £263.7 million (about $370 million). The highest of these was the £163 million (about $228 million) fine imposed on Deutsche Bank by the FCA in 2017 for breaching the FCA’s own money laundering control rules by laundering $10 billion out of Russia in the “mirror trade” case.

The next highest fine was Barclays Bank in 2015 at £72 million (about $101 million) for deliberately breaching money laundering rules in relation to a transaction involving politically exposed persons. All the other fines have been less than £10 million (about $14 million). Startlingly absent is any fine against UK headquartered banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered which have both faced multiple fines for money laundering in the United States and elsewhere and have been implicated in numerous money laundering scandals.

The total lack of prosecutions and the low rate of even regulatory fines is surprising...

[ltr]

I appreciate learning this, and am shocked:

https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/money-laundering-why-the-uk-does-not-prosecute-it/

May 7, 2019

The UK doesn’t prosecute money laundering (and that should change)

Despite the UK’s rhetoric about wanting a “world-leading reputation for integrity” as a financial centre, it has never prosecuted a single company or bank for money laundering.

Given the scale of money laundered through the UK, this is pretty extraordinary....

[ltr]

So all this is why AIG used London to sell insurance policies that could never be met if and when necessary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html?ref=business

September 28, 2008

Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

"It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions." — Joseph J. Cassano, a former A.I.G. executive, August 2007

[Dipper]

@ PeteW " some of his more persistent recent commenters really should refrain from making forceful and assertive comments on subjects they seem to know almost nothing about.", well, quite.

@ltr

"Startlingly absent is any fine against UK headquartered banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered which have both faced multiple fines for money laundering in the United States and elsewhere" You think the US regulators and other regulators are unbiased and ours is corrupt? Maybe national regulators like to bash banks based in other nations?

Perhaps the reason there have not been prosecutions is because there is nothing to prosecute. It is practically impossible in any significant bank to deal with a counterpart unless the counterparty is set up on a system, and that only happens if the lawyers and Compliance departments are satisfied that the full KYC procedures have been gone through. And these professionals talk to regulators to ensure they understand how the regulations are being interpreted.

But I get it now. The reason people drone on and on about Russian dirty money, Russian interference, and no hard data of any size exists. Because you are just looking for an excuse. A reason why politicians you don't like keep getting elected, why political causes you like get beaten at the ballot box. Because it is so much more convenient to believe in spooks and interference than face the fact staring you in the face that the electorate over a period of years have considered and rejected your ideas. It's like a political equivalent of 'Most Haunted', a team of committed people continually believing spooks are just round the corner despite the lack of any actual evidence.

You don't actually want any proper investigations or prosecutions. You just want to be able to go dodgy Russian money blah blah Russian interference blah blah.

[Dipper]

... and from that truepublica report " In 2015, Deutsche Bank found “strong evidence” that the UK had received $93 billion in hidden inflows between 2006-2015 with a significant portion coming from Russia.".

Well, I guess that would largely be money heading to London from Danske Bank. Once the money is in the European system, or the US or any other regulated system, it is practically quite hard to stop it flowing around.

The majority of the fines referred to are to do with PPI and related to rate fixings. Nothing to do with Russians laundering money or anyone else. And if you think what is being delivered in cases such as Mark Johnson https://www.fx-markets.com/people/mark-johnson is justice than I sincerely hope should you ever get in front of a judge you don't get similar treatment.

[ltr]

Dipper:

Perhaps the reason there have not been prosecutions is because there is nothing to prosecute....

[ Yes, this too makes sense.

Then, I am looking for a latent legal problem that might not exist. Now to read some and think this through.

Thanks. ]

[Blissex]

«Mere knowledge of cognitive biases, however, is not sufficient guard against them: I've known about the false consensus effect for years, [...] Rational thinking requires habits and, failing that, institutions that promote good thinking and select against bad - institutions we don't possess.»

It is always so precious to read out blogger's pure wykehamism, where politics and political economy and policy are high minded rational debates about ideas and we need to get rid of biases to base them on good thinking. Almost as if that beardy german guy had not talked about class interest based politics, Economics, policies.

[Blissex]

On the subject of policy about "money laundering":

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-01/britain-s-white-collar-cops-are-getting-too-good-at-their-job
«Early in the Q&A portion, Green signaled for a microphone and asked a deceptively straightforward question: What did Cameron think of the anticorruption work of the SFO — an agency set up precisely to investigate and prosecute high-level corporate crime?
Cameron, a genteel Etonian with more than his share of the erudition required for high office in the U.K., was somehow tongue-tied.
“The SFO, yes, I do support its work,” he stammered, pausing for several seconds. But there seemed to be a but, and Cameron began to hedge. “As prime minister, you do feel a responsibility for wanting British business to get out there and win orders and succeed,” he said, adding, “so sometimes there are frustrations and worries and concerns.”
To anyone unversed in the folkways of official Britain, the Green-Cameron exchange would seem strange. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. president, Donald Trump aside, being asked if he supported the FBI — let alone responding that it ought to think about the commercial damage when it goes after suspected criminals.»

Or using formally-offshore shell corporations:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/labour-fears-corbyn-will-be-seen-as-unambitious-3tww86v5n
«Labour MPs have raised concerns that Jeremy Corbyn’s rhetoric on tax avoidance could appear anti-aspiration. A senior shadow cabinet source said the party leader was in danger of overreaching himself in his criticism of David Cameron for investing in Blairmore, the fund set up in an offshore tax haven in the Bahamas by his father Ian.»

[Blissex]

As to the retail level of money laundering and tax "avoidance", a commenter on "The Guardian" reported:

«London is indeed full of oligarchs from the USA to Outer Mongolia,hell bent of out spending and out doing their neighbours,if they even bother to turn up. Running a small cleaning company in the magic areas over the last few years has been insane.The demand for our cleaning services is high and we are able to turn down the so called oligarchs who whine about price but never about the quality, of course it won’t last
Many of our payments are coming from North African based banks within the Spanish territories ,Morocco, Algeria and most unusual Mali,who seems to issue a huge number of loaded debit cards for payment of services. In very recent years,many of the houses we clean, have been mortgaged to once again Mali based banks,although they have very familiar names, eg Santander.»

Since the New York Times reported that GCHQ and the NSA get a complete realtime copy of all SWIFT transactions (and of course much else besides):

«In all the controversy in June 2013 over the US security services accessing people’s social media interactions through the PRISM system, it’s often forgotten that they had since 9/11 been accessing details of most of our financial transactions through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system (SWIFT). [ ... ] But it also raised uncomfortable issues around America’s potential access to the private finances and spending records of prominent politicians and businesspeople around the world.»

Then we can be sure that "the government" knows *everything* about who launders money, where, and how (that's the entire purpose of "anti-terrorist" surveillance of financial systems), but somehow never acts on it (except I hope for blackmail, or my tax pounds are being wasted).

[ltr]

Dipper:

The reason people drone on and on about Russian dirty money, Russian interference, and no hard data of any size exists. Because you are just looking for an excuse....

[ Really important, since if this is a moot issue still fear of Russia or Russians is used to manipulate British political positions. ]

[Dipper]

@ Blissex "his criticism of David Cameron for investing in Blairmore, the fund set up in an offshore tax haven in the Bahamas by his father Ian"

This is standard. Tax is paid when the money comes back onshore as income. Do you want your pension fund to pay tax twice?

[PeteW]

Without wishing to sidetrack further our host's thread, which is about cognitive biases, I can recommend Oliver Bullough's "Moneyland" as an readable and entertaining starting point for anyone curious about Soviet kleptocracy, state plunder, tax avoidance and money laundering.

[Blissex]

«Tax is paid when the money comes back onshore as income.»

At the very least this avoids some other taxes, like those on capital, but the extraordinary claim that the gains and profits are brought back as taxable income seems to me an allegation that upper class people like the Cameron family are really thick, and without any supporting evidence.

Just consider more carefully the quotes ”Morocco, Algeria and most unusual Mali,who seems to issue a huge number of loaded debit cards for payment of services” and “many of the houses we clean, have been mortgaged to once again Mali based banks”.

These and many other techniques seem to be very common occurrences, especially for people earning their income in the City, and I guess that most of the income of high-income or high-wealth people is effectively tax-free even without resorting to spending 6 months+1 day per year in Monaco, Dubai etc.

[Paulc156]

https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/treasury-committee/news-parliament-2017/report-published-economic-crime-17-19/

That 2019 report chaired by Nicky Morgan (former Tory cabinet minister) highlights the extremely fragmented nature of the regulatory regime tasked with enforcing anti laundering measures.

The one below titled:
HOW WE UNCOVERED THE UK BUSINESSES ENTANGLED IN MAJOR CORRUPTION AND MONEY LAUNDERING CASES
https://www.transparency.org.uk/uncovered-uk-businesses-corruption-money-laundering-cases

Much of this laundering is traced to shell companies set up in British overseas tax havens and with Baltic bank accounts.

"we identified 929 UK companies involved in 89 cases of corruption and money laundering, amounting to £137 billion in economic damage. 260 of these companies were Limited Liability Partnerships, most of which were controlled by identikit companies registered in secrecy havens like Belize and the Seychelles. These secretive offshore entities control hundreds – sometimes thousands – of UK companies, making it hard to identify who really owns them."

[Dipper]

hang on a minute here

"shell companies set up in British overseas tax havens and with Baltic bank accounts." ... yes that's what I said. Scottish Limited Partnerships, Danske Bank, Estonia.

...Mali based banks

Once the money is in the account of a bank which is internationally recognised it has been laundered. So, as I said, the money is being laundered elsewhere. The idea that London is the nexus of money laundering isn't supported by these reports. If a cleaning company is taking money from dodgy 'businessmen' with Mali bank accounts and depositing it in the Esher branch of the Coop Bank I'm not sure what that has to do with the 'City of London'.

The observation that the most exciting vibrant multicultural city in the world is attracting lots of rich people from overseas isn't new or interesting. But the laundering would appear to be taking place elsewhere.

The fact that organisations who rely for their funding on the notion that there is lots of undiscovered crime happening right under our noses produce reports that say there is lots of undiscovered crime happening right under our noses isn't surprising. In the same way that organisations who represent minority groups keep producing reports that say discrimination and hate crimes against their particular group is bad and rising, so we need more money isn't surprising. If I set up an organisation representing ginger left-handers, the first thing I'm doing is producing a 'survey' that says 80% of ginger left-handers have been on the end of 'hate crimes and micro-aggressions'.

If there is one lesson we keep learning and have learnt in spades in the last five years it is that there are no impartial neutral observers, everyone has an angle, everyone is looking for more money and power,
and objectivity is a myth.

[Postkey]

"In the aftermath of these initial compromises in 1987, criminal money managers in both the US and the UK were able to continue to operate in an environment that easily allowed them to hide and use dirty money."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12117-020-09386-8

[Dipper]

@ Postkey

Well, surprise, left wing academics decide that international Capitalism is bad.

The post 1987 world has seen massive increases in living standards across the globe, increases in longevity, literacy, decreases in child mortality, poverty, largely enabled by international finance being able to move money around to invest in dev eloping nations.

If you want to clamp down on international corruption then the first thing to do is to shut down the UK's foreign aid budget. By funnelling large amounts of money into non-productive activity based on aid it encourages a system of graft and crowds out genuine wealth creation.

There are regular prosecutions of people involved in money laundering and other financial crimes. People working in the city who break the law get sent to prison on a regular basis.

An East-African Indian once explained to me why so many people in Africa keep their wealth in US Dollar bills. Every so often the government changes the currency. That means you have to go into a bank and exchange all your old currency for new currency. The government then know you have wealth and come after you to shake you down.

It is easy to sit here and moan about offshore accounts and secrecy, but the alternative is allowing governments of whatever shade of criminality full access to the wealth of their citizens. I'm not convinced that is progress.

Corbyn wanted this. We all know what would have happened. Genuine wealth creation replaced by a system of graft based round loyalty to senior Labour Party members, whose families would mysteriously become wealthy whilst everyone else got poorer.

[PeteW]

Almost exactly 29 years ago, I was one of a small number of people summoned to a conference room at the Bank of England to be told how the Bank of Credit and Commerce International had been raided by law enforcement worldwide for massive fraud and money laundering.

I still remember the looks of shock and incomprehension among the officials. How could this have happened? We're bankers! We have regulations!

Plus ca change.

[Dipper]

@ PeteW. I think we are getting off the track somewhat.

Chris says 'the Intelligence Select Committee's report on Russian influence on UK politics. This has highlighted the fact that Russian oligarchs are using London to launder their dirty reputations and dirty money'.

My point is firstly that they are actually laundering their money elsewhere and bringing their laundered money to London, and secondly that people who believe that the reason they keep losing elections is because of interference from Russia are deluding themselves. They are losing elections because an electorally decisive group of people disagree with them. And they don't disagree because the Russians are exercising some mystical hold over their minds, but because they look at the choices and rationally choose a different one. Or as rationally as anyone is about politics.

I get that a large part of the world operates on a basis of corruption and crime. If as a nation you decide you are going to be relatively open to people from other nations to live in your country then some of that corruption and crime is going to end up in your country. That doesn't mean they have some vice-like grip on the nation's politics.

[Postkey]

"If you want to clamp down on international corruption then the first thing to do is to shut down the UK's foreign aid budget."
If it is anything like the US aid budget?

‘A few years ago I sought to update my breakdown of the balance of payments to update the impact of U.S. military spending and foreign aid. But the Commerce Department’s Table 5 from its balance of payments data had been changed in such a way it no longer reveals the extent to which foreign aid generates a transfer of dollars from foreign countries to the United States, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. I phoned the statistical division responsible for collecting these statistics and in due course reached the technician responsible for the numbers. “We used to publish that data,” he explained, “but some joker published a report showing that the United States actually made money off the countries we were aiding. It caused such a stir that we changed the accounting format so that nobody can embarrass us like that again.” I realized that I was the joker who had been responsible for the present-day statistical concealment, and that it would take a Congressional request to get the Commerce and State Departments to replicate the analysis that still was being made public in the years in which I wrote Super Imperialism. ‘
https://www.soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0303critic/030317hudson/superimperialism.pdf

[Angus the Man Hugger]

@ Dipper, it’s a fair point that you make. It would not be possible to waltz into a London bank with a wheelbarrow of ill-gotten loot, and expect a cashier to deposit it for you. And as the Russia Report seemed to say, Britain is now in damage limitation mode because the horse has already bolted. We’re dealing with the near-equivalent of the wheelbarrows arriving in the 90s and noughties.

It is however possible to launder cash into the legal economy with relatively greater ease elsewhere in the world where wheelbarrows are, if not legal, still possible.

The problem arises because this money wants to come to London. Because - not only do you have access to the world class city that is London - but also because the provenance of your booty will not be investigated.

Your point about corrupt money holding British policy in its thrall is a bit of a strawman - that’s your assertion not others, who might assert that corrupt money looks after its limited interests. I noted with some dismay that despite the government crowing about its launch of the Magnitsky Act, the act does not include provision for sanctions to be applied to corrupt sources of cash. Surprised? Not really.