Bullough Says $200B Global AML System Fails to Dent Illicit Cash

布洛称2000亿美元全球反洗钱体系未能遏制非法现金流 全球每年反洗钱合规支出超过2000亿美元，但监管激励措施失效以及实物现金的持续发行，使得犯罪活动占全球GDP的比重自20世纪90年代以来未发生改变。 尽管日常消费者的现金使用量大幅下降，但流通中的纸币总量仍在持续增长，原因在于非法犯罪网络依赖100美元面额等大额纸币来转移不可追踪的资金价值。全球每年投入超过2000亿美元的反洗钱（AML）工作在很大程度上未能削减规模在2万亿至5万亿美元之间的犯罪经济，犯罪集团通过基于贸易的洗钱、高价值奢侈品以及华人洗钱网络绕过银行管控。本期内容探讨了加密稳定币如今如何强化这些传统现金运作、美第奇银行业和欧洲旋转木马欺诈等历史先例的运作机制，以及为何当前的AML法规让执法部门被大量未阅读的报告所淹没，却未能阻止系统性洗钱。 尽管消费者广泛采用数字支付，流通中的实物现金总量仍在持续增长，这主要受到地下经济对100美元等大额钞票需求的强力推动。 (0:00) 非法资金流动估计占全球GDP的2%至5%（每年达2万亿至5万亿美元），自IMF在20世纪90年代末确立该基准以来，这一比例基本未变。 (0:00) 全球每年在反洗钱（AML）合规上的支出超过2000亿美元，但未能减少全球犯罪经济的整体市场份额。 (0:00) 虽然大型银行的合规失误频频占据媒体头条，但与实物现金走私和基于贸易的洗钱相比，传统电子银行在全球非法资产转移中所占的比例很小。 (10:00) 基于贸易的洗钱（TBML）是非法资金流动最大的单一渠道，每年通过虚开发票货物、农用机械和国际贸易资产转移超过1万亿美元资金。 (10:00)

Oliver Bullough and Bloomberg's Odd Lots argue that despite more than $200 billion spent annually on anti-money laundering compliance, global illicit financial flows remain virtually unchanged since the 1990s because criminal networks bypass banking surveillance using trade offsets, stablecoins, and universally trusted, high-density physical cash like the $100 bill. The Multi-Billion-Dollar Failure of Global AML Compliance (0:00) Since the late 1990s, when then-IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus estimated illicit flows at 2% to 5% of global GDP ($2 trillion to $5 trillion annually), the criminal economy's estimated share has remained virtually flat. Oliver Bullough argues that decades of enforcement under frameworks derived from the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) have failed to shrink this footprint, merely preventing further expansion. Meanwhile, global AML compliance costs exceed $200 billion annually according to LexisNexis, outstripping the estimated $150 billion needed each year to end world hunger and provide clean water. Bullough notes that asymmetric incentives compel financial institutions to file mountains of unread Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to avoid multi-billion-dollar fines for false negatives. This defensive reporting overwhelms under-resourced law enforcement, encourages widespread "debanking" of innocent individuals, and does little to deter criminals who exploit state-issued physical cash. High-Density Physical Value and Trade-Based Balancing (10:00) While major banking compliance scandals attract headlines, formal banking accounts for only a fraction of illicit cross-border transfers. Instead, physical cash smuggling and trade-based money laundering (TBML) dominate, with think tank Global Financial Integrity estimating TBML generates over $1 trillion in illicit flows annually. Because cartels selling narcotics in North America and Europe must balance their accounting books against illicit revenues, they require high-value physical conduits that circumvent electronic wire transfers. To repatriate value beyond the estimated $25 billion in physical cash smuggled into Mexico each year, criminal syndicates purchase heavy capital goods like Caterpillar and John Deere tractors, or divert luxury European designer apparel into China. Smugglers also exploit items with high value density per unit of spatial volume: a $1 million luxury watch can be worn past airport customs checkpoints that legally enforce a $10,000 threshold on physical cash, moving seven figures of value undetected across international borders. Circular Shadow Clearing and Historical Precedents (17:00) Rather than routing illicit capital through correspondent banking rails, shadow brokers use domestic value-offsetting mechanisms. Under China's strict capital controls, which restrict individuals to exporting $50,000 annually, Chinese Money Laundering Networks (CMLNs) match wealthy Chinese citizens seeking offshore liquidity with surplus physical cash held by Western drug cartels. Historically dubbed the "Vancouver Model," affluent nationals accepted illicit cash outside Canadian casinos to gamble and clear funds, while value was balanced internationally through trade goods, precursor chemicals, and underground accounts. Bullough points out that this shadow ledger system mirrors late medieval and Renaissance banking: the Medici family similarly bypassed bullion transport by matching local deposits with commercial trade in silk, spices, and wool across European branches. A contemporary European variation is Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) carousel fraud, which abuses zero-rated cross-border EU Value Added Tax rules across shell companies to systematically extract an estimated €50 billion annually directly from government treasuries. The Cash-Crypto Hybrid and the $100 Bill's Primacy (45:00) Cryptocurrency has not supplanted physical currency; rather, criminal syndicates stack cash and digital assets together. Street operations convert bulky cash revenues into stablecoins to instantly transmit funds across borders to drug-producing nations like Colombia. Additionally, as stablecoin issuers purchase large reserves of U.S. Treasury bills to back their tokens, the ecosystem effectively provides low-cost financing to the U.S. government. Despite the availability of alternative assets, the physical U.S. $100 bill remains the dominant universal currency of international crime. Bullough notes that although the 200 euro banknote provides twice the monetary value per unit of physical volume, criminal enterprises overwhelmingly choose the $100 bill due to its superior global liquidity, network effects, and unshakeable international trust. Bullough concludes that repairing the broken AML regime requires abandoning the defensive status quo of generating unmanageable volumes of compliance reports, shifting regulatory incentives toward actionable intelligence, and properly resourcing law enforcement to prosecute financial networks and strip the profit out of organized crime.

彭博社《Odd Lots》节目指出，尽管日常消费中的实体现金使用大幅缩减，但以100美元纸币为代表的高额纸币流通量却持续激增，成为庞大地下经济的关键润滑剂。调查记者Oliver Bullough等人强调，全球每年耗费超过2000亿美元的反洗钱合规成本，却未能撼动占全球GDP 2%至5%的犯罪资金规模，揭示了现行金融合规体系在应对实物走私、贸易洗钱与地下对账时的系统性失效。 现金悖论与反洗钱监管的巨额成本 (0:00) 虽然日常消费者越来越倾向于无现金支付，但全球纸币发行总量仍在攀升，其中绝大多数价值以高面额钞票（尤其是100美元纸币）的形式存在。这种现象背后的核心推动力是非法地下经济对不可追踪现金的持续刚需。根据国际货币基金组织（IMF）前总裁Michel Camdessus在1990年代后期提出的基准测算，全球非法资金流约占全球国内生产总值（GDP）的2%至5%，相当于每年洗钱规模达2万亿至5万亿美元。近三十年来这一占比基本维持不变，表明多年推行的反洗钱（AML）法律未能有效缩减犯罪经济的市场份额。 与此同时，依据美国1970年《银行保密法》（BSA）及金融行动特别工作组（FATF）标准建立的合规体系带来了沉重的经济负担。根据LexisNexis的估算，全球金融机构在反洗钱合规上的年支出已超过2000亿美元。相比之下，全球消除饥饿并普及清洁饮用水的年预估资金需求仅为1500亿美元。合规成本高企与犯罪规模居高不下并存，凸显了现行监管框架的局限性。 贸易洗钱与高价值密度的实物载体 (10:00) 尽管主流跨国银行的合规丑闻频频登上头条，但受监管的银行系统仅承担了全球非法资金转移的一小部分。华盛顿智库全球金融诚信组织（Global Financial Integrity）估计，基于贸易的洗钱（TBML）每年涉及的非法资金超过1万亿美元，跨境物理现金走私亦达数千亿美元规模。以美墨边境为例，虽然每年约有250亿美元现金被走私入境墨西哥，但仍无法完全平衡毒品流入美国所产生的巨额贸易逆差。为了结算差额并避免银行合规预警，犯罪网络通过商业贸易闭环来回流资产，例如在北美用毒资采购卡特彼勒（Caterpillar）或约翰迪尔（John Deere）农用重型机械，再运往境外变现。 在欧洲，资金平衡则依赖高档奢侈品（如Gucci手袋、Burberry大衣）经由灰色市场输入中国，以交换制造违禁品的前体化学品或违禁货物。此外，“单位空间价值密度”极高的商品成为天然的跨境货币替代品：旅客佩戴一块价值100万美元的名表登机无需申报，可轻松规避机场对超过10,000美元现金的强制申报要求，在目的地转售即可完成巨额价值的隐蔽转移。 地下对冲：温哥华模式与增值税骗局 (17:00) 跨国犯罪网络的结算往往通过不发生跨境资金电汇的对冲机制完成。中国对个人每年5万美元的结售汇额度限制，催生了富裕群体对海外硬通货的强烈需求。中国洗钱网络（CMLN）充当影子经纪人，将这一换汇需求与西方贩毒集团（如拉美卡特彼勒集团、意大利光荣会及阿尔巴尼亚帮派）积累的本地巨额现金库存进行匹配。在加拿大警方发现的“温哥华模式”中，富裕人士在中国境内支付资金，随后在加拿大赌场外接收装满现金的购物袋，再将其转化为赌场筹码或债务，完成不经过银行跨境通道的闭环清算。这种内部账目对冲并非现代发明，其机制与文艺复兴时期美第奇家族依托国际贸易凭证转移资产的记账方式如出一辙。 在欧洲，另一项利用制度缝隙的典型是非洲及欧洲各地的“失踪交易商内部增值税诈骗”（MTIC，即旋转木马骗局）。由于欧盟成员国之间的跨境货物交易适用零税率，犯罪集团进口免税货物后在境内经空壳公司转售并加征增值税，随后进口商“失踪”潜逃，出口方再向国库申请退还从未实际缴纳的税款。该骗局从英国外溢至整个欧洲大陆，演变为每年耗损国库约500亿欧元的跨国协作型犯罪网络。 稳定币与百元美钞的犯罪通货地位 (45:00) 加密货币并未完全颠覆实物犯罪手法，而是与现金形成了高效的叠加架构。底层犯罪网络通常将街头收集的笨重纸币现金兑换为稳定币，利用区块链网络即时将资金转移给哥伦比亚等地的原料与违禁品供应商。部分受制裁主体（如俄罗斯、伊朗相关网络）甚至试图建立专用加密资产来绕过西方控制的支付轨道。 然而在主权货币层面，尽管200欧元纸币的面值体积密度是百元美钞的两倍，但100美元纸币依然牢牢占据全球犯罪经济的“通用语言”地位。这源于美元无与伦比的全球流动性、通用信任度以及深厚的结构性市场网络，复刻了其在合法全球经济中的霸权地位。此外，稳定币发行机构为支撑币值而大量购入美国国债，客观上也为美国政府提供了巨额的低成本融资支持。 银行保密法起源与合规体系的扭曲 (50:00) 现代反洗钱法律渊源于1960年代由美国得克萨斯州民主党籍众议员Wright Patman主导的听证会，其凭借强烈的民粹主义立场对抗垄断金融资本，最终推动出台了1970年《银行保密法》（BSA）。然而，Bullough批评称，现行合规体系已经蜕变为一个成本高昂且效率低下的“黑洞”。金融机构若出现合规疏漏将面临数以十亿美元计的重罚，这种不对称惩罚机制迫使银行部门采取防御性合规，过度生成海量的“可疑活动报告”（SARs）。 与此形成鲜明对比的是，执法部门因软硬件与人力匮乏，根本无法逐一审查数以十万计的SARs报告，大量警报从未被实质性转化为执法线索。更具破坏性的负面效应是，过度防御导致银行对高风险群体实施大范围的“去银行化”（debanking），无辜公众（尤其是特定少数族裔与穆斯林群体）因而被排斥在正规金融系统之外，违背了金融普惠与精准打击犯罪的初衷。 该讨论揭示的核心悖论在于：政府一方面对正规银行体系施加日益严苛且低效的合规审查，另一方面又持续印制便于匿名交易的高额纸币；而加密稳定币的普及进一步放大了这种制度缝隙。Bullough主张，反洗钱机制必须从追求报告数量转向以追缴犯罪资产为核心的执法激励，但只要各国在资本管制、税收规则及现金发行上的结构性矛盾依然存在，地下平行金融网络对百元美钞与跨国贸易洗钱的依赖就难以根除。

## Background 本期节目由彭博社（Bloomberg）旗下的知名财经播客《Odd Lots》于 2026 年 9 月 7 日在各大播客平台及网页端发布。节目简介指出，在日常移动支付高度普及的当下，流通中的实物现金（特别是 100 美元大钞）总量却反常激增；两位主持人对话《大家都爱我们的美元》作者、调查记者奥利弗·布洛（Oliver Bullough），深入揭示了这笔巨额现钞背后庞大的全球洗钱网络，以及犯罪集团如何像文艺复兴时期的银行家那样通过实物贸易平衡黑金账目。 ## TL;DR 节目深入剖析了全美流通的 2.4 万亿美元现金中百元美钞占比高达 85% 的“纸币悖论”，指出其本质是每年占全球 GDP 2% 至 5% 的地下犯罪与洗钱经济的直接投射。犯罪网络为了绕开监管，普遍采用重型农机对冲毒资的“贸易型洗钱”、撮合跨境换汇的“温哥华模型”以及现金搭配稳定币的复合链条，构建起不发生跨国电汇即可转移价值的平行金融帝国。讽刺的是，全球金融业每年耗费 2000 亿美元应对繁琐低效的反洗钱合规，而各国央行和政府出于对数万亿美元“无息贷款”铸币税的依赖，以及多国博弈下的集体行动困境，根本无意真正废除大钞，使得百元美钞凭借极致的空间价值密度与不可替代的流动性，持续稳坐全球黑金的通用语言宝座。 ## Atmosphere & style 对谈在彭博标志性的硬核宏观金融分析中融入了调查新闻的犀利与黑色幽默。主持人 Joe 和 Tracy 配合默契、互动风趣，从地下扑克牌局与联储金库见闻信手拈来，与自带英式辛辣冷幽默的嘉宾 Oliver Bullough 碰撞出极高密度的思想火花。整场对话将复杂的增值税骗局与地下钱庄账本解构成引人入胜的精彩叙事，在带给听众洞悉金融暗网的智力解谜快感之余，也弥漫着对官僚制度性瘫痪与利益合谋的深刻嘲讽。 ## Bulletin - `02:50` 全美流通的 2.4 万亿美元现金中，百元美钞占比高达 85%，但普通人日常极少携带大额现金，显示出宏观发行与合法消费场景的严重脱节。 - `05:00` 全球每年洗钱规模约占全球 GDP 的 2% 至 5%（约 2 万亿至 5 万亿美元），而全球金融机构每年的反洗钱合规成本高达约 2000 亿美元，但打击犯罪资金的实际成效微乎其微。 - `35:10` 大额纸币难以被废除的核心阻力在于铸币税利益：2.5 万亿美元在外流通实物美元相当于美国政府获得的巨额无息贷款，有效压低了庞大国债的付息成本。 - `15:47` 现代洗钱已构建起平行金融体系，利用“温哥华模型”撮合毒资与跨境购汇需求，并结合稳定币与高价值实物贸易实现无跨境银行电汇的瞬间价值对冲。 ## Key takeaways - `31:07` “纸币悖论”打破了传统经济学假说：在电子支付高度普及、ATM数量撤减与通胀回升的背景下，全球大额纸币发行量反常激增并连创新高。 - `33:28` 官方关于现金作为“价值储存手段”的解释与现实脱节：美国家庭平均仅备有约 430 美元现金，而全美人均流通现钞却超过 7000 美元，绝大多数大钞流向境外与地下经济。 - `12:35` 贸易型洗钱（TBML）年规模高达约 1 万亿美元，犯罪集团通过虚报进出口发票、走私重型农机设备或奢侈品，直接转移浓缩价值以平衡跨境黑金账目。 - `15:47` “温哥华模型”将中国富人的海外外汇需求与欧美毒贩的本地现金供给精准对接，利用国内对冲转账与物资进出口彻底规避了跨境银行电汇监管。 - `20:00` 现代跨国洗钱机制镜像了文艺复兴时期美第奇银行体系，通过异地货物贸易对冲与秘密账本转移价值本身，而非直接跨境搬运实物货币。 - `25:13` 旋转木马增值税诈骗（MTIC）利用欧盟跨国免税与国内征税漏洞，借助“失踪交易商”凭空套取 20% 国库退税，演变为年损数百亿欧元的无摩擦提款机制。 - `37:25` 政府部门间的“信息孤岛”让反洗钱陷入停滞：发钞的财政部与央行坐收铸币税带来的巨额无息融资，无动力自断财路；打击毒品与犯罪的社会成本则由其他部门承担。 - `40:00` 单边废除大额纸币面临“集体行动难题”：若美国单方面停印百元美钞，洗钱需求将迅速流向欧元或瑞郎大钞，不仅无法根除犯罪，还会白白损失铸币税。 - `45:00` 现代洗钱进化为“双层架构”：基层末端继续依赖隐蔽的实物现金，中间层与跨境端则迅速将现金兑换为稳定币进行瞬时链上清算。 - `47:30` 100 美元纸币凭借无可比拟的网络效应与深层流动性，至今依然牢牢稳坐全球地下经济与跨国黑金的“通用语言”（Lingua Franca）宝座。 - `50:00` 当前反洗钱监管机制陷入制度性瘫痪：银行因惧怕天价罚单而机械提交数百万份“可疑活动报告”，但执法机构缺乏资源审阅，致使合规体系沦为无用黑洞并引发无辜者“去银行化”。 - `56:15` 洗钱经济学的底层逻辑是对“空间价值密度”的极致追求：从百元美钞、名贵腕表到稳定币，本质上都是为了在最小物理或信息空间内浓缩最高价值，回归了货币作为便携价值载体的最初形态。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 线下活动预告与美联储现金金库的奇妙回忆 在正式开场前，节目公布了一则听友活动信息：彭博《Odd Lots》播客的主持人 Joe Weisenthal 与 Tracy Alloway 将于 9 月 17 日在洛杉矶好莱坞的佛蒙特剧院（Vermont Theater）录制现场节目，届时会有特别嘉宾出席。 随后两位主持人切入正题。Tracy 回忆起他们此前参观芝加哥联储（Chicago Fed）现金处理设施的经历，当时由芝加哥联储主席奥斯坦·古尔斯比（Austan Goolsbee）亲自带队陪同。那次参观彻底刷新了她对物理纸币的认知：整个金库不仅充斥着巨量的现钞和一种极其独特的油墨气味，纸币的色彩层次也令人惊叹。人们平时总以为美元就是千篇一律的绿色，但成捆堆叠起来看，其实有如“五十度绿”，甚至能隐约看出粉色和橙色等复杂层次。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 现金悖论与洗钱驱动链 accDescr: 展现美联储现金流通数据与日常支付脱节的现象以及地下非法经济对其的支撑关系 subgraph FedStats ["美联储流通数据"] A["全美纸币流通总额: 2.4万亿美元"] B["百元美钞占比: 高达 85%"] A --> B end subgraph RealityGap ["日常现实断层"] C["公众日常现金支付持续萎缩"] D["ATM提款多为20/10/5美元小额钞票"] C <--> D end subgraph Underworld ["地下资金需求"] E["高面额现钞真实流向"] E --> F["毒品交易与跨国走私"] E --> G["金融诈骗与地下赌博"] E --> H["规避外汇与资本管制"] end B -.-> RealityGap RealityGap --> Underworld ``` --- ### `02:50` 百元美钞的流动悖论与“扑克之夜”线索 在那次参观中，古尔斯比透露了一个极为震撼的数据：在全美流通的高达 2.4 万亿美元现金中，居然有 **85%** 都是 100 美元面额的纸币。这一统计数据引发了极大的现实困惑。一方面，绝大多数普通人在日常生活中越来越少使用现金，移动支付和刷卡已成常态；但另一方面，物理纸币的发行总量却不降反升，且绝大多数都是老百姓极少随身携带的百元大钞。Tracy 指出，人们平时即使去 ATM 机器取款，通常也只会提取 20 美元甚至 5 美元、10 美元的零钱，几乎没人揣着厚厚一叠百元钞票满街跑。 古尔斯比将这种现象称为宏观统计数据与普通美国人日常现金使用习惯之间的“脱节”（disconnect）。但 Joe 指出，答案其实显而易见：高面值纸币是地下非法交易与犯罪经济的天然血液。Joe 甚至讲起了自己亲历的趣事来印证这一点——他上一次揣着厚厚一叠百元钞票回家，是在纽约市参加一场非正规、未受监管的地下扑克牌局之后。面对 Tracy 调侃他是在“凡尔赛”（humble brag）自己赢了钱，Joe 笑着澄清：“我没赢，我只是说当晚我没有输光所有本金。”这种非正规赌博、地下经济和灰色流转，恰恰是百元大钞最核心的现实去向。 - **流通现金总额**：约 2.4 万亿美元。 - **百元钞占比**：85%，在流通价值中占据压倒性统治地位。 - **使用断层**：普通消费者日常以小额纸币（5、10、20 美元）为主，百元美钞在正规消费场景中极度罕见。 --- ### `05:00` 洗钱的宏观体量与米歇尔·康德苏的经典测算 为了彻底厘清巨额百元现钞背后的地下金融网络，节目邀请了《大家都爱我们的美元：洗钱如何大获全胜》（*Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won*）一书的作者、调查记者奥利弗·布洛（Oliver Bullough）。 谈及洗钱的整体规模，布洛坦言，犯罪分子显然不会主动向税务局递交真实的纳税申报单，因此不可能有精确的审计数据。目前国际上最通行的基准估计是：全球每年被洗白的资金约占**全球 GDP 的 2% 至 5%**。以当前全球约 100 万亿美元的 GDP 总量计算，这意味着每年有 **2 万亿至 5 万亿美元** 的黑钱在金融系统中穿梭洗白。主持人幽默地感叹，现在的科技界总是用“这笔钱能造多少座 AI 数据中心”来量化财富规模，而这笔洗钱体量哪怕用来建数据中心都庞大得惊人。尽管如今加密货币等“闪闪发光的新事物”备受关注，但犯罪分子骨子里依然极其传统，实物纸币依旧是他们转移和隐藏财富的最核心工具之一。 这个广泛引用的 2% 至 5% 区间到底从何而来？布洛解释道，这一估算最早出自 1990 年代末期时任国际货币基金组织（IMF）总裁的法国央行家米歇尔·康德苏（Michel Camdessus）。当时康德苏结合了数位经济学家的测算模型给出了这个宽泛的“猜测值”（guesstimate）。在此后的数十年里，宏观经济学家和微观分析师曾从不同路径进行验证与质疑，但最终得出的推算区间往往都会落回这个范围。 然而，布洛指出这个数据背后隐藏着一个令人极其不安的真相： > “如果犯罪经济占全球经济的份额现在与 1990 年代末完全相同，那就意味着自 90 年代末以来我们为打击洗钱所做的一切努力——那是极其庞大的工程——本质上除了阻止犯罪经济进一步扩张之外，几乎毫无建树。” 自反洗钱法规建立以来，犯罪分子展现出了无休止的企业家精神（entrepreneurial nature），其进化速度始终走在监管机构、执法部门和各国政府的前面。Tracy 对此深有感触：她此前报道银行业时，听到最多的就是各大银行对于反洗钱与“了解你的客户”（KYC）合规成本的漫天抱怨——银行必须耗费海量人力去填写数以万计的“可疑活动报告”（SARs），但在如此严苛繁琐的监管之下，实际遏制犯罪资金的效果却微乎其微。 ### `10:00` 耗资两千亿的反洗钱合规迷局与现金走私 面对银行业的抱怨，外界往往将其当作借口一笑了之，但银行的痛点确有其合理性。当前全球建立的反洗钱（AML）和反恐融资体系极其繁琐且具有侵入性。这套机制最早可追溯至美国1970年通过的《银行保密法》（Bank Secrecy Act）。然而单凭一国之力根本无法打击洗钱，因为犯罪分子可以轻易把钞票打包空运到巴哈马、开曼群岛或巴拿马。自1980年代末金融行动特别工作组（FATF）成立以来，国际社会逐步形成了全球化的反洗钱合作网络。根据 LexisNexis 的估算，全球金融机构每年的反洗钱合规成本高达约 2000 亿美元。如果把这笔巨款用于解决全球饥饿，并为全人类提供清洁水和卫生设施，甚至还能剩下约 500 亿美元。 银行为了避免天价罚单，不得不斥巨资开发精密的 AI 合规软件，每年申报数以百万计的“可疑活动报告”（SARs）。但这套庞大而官僚的机器并未奏效，犯罪分子始终领先一步。尽管聚光灯常聚焦在被重罚的合规金融机构身上（如汇丰银行、丹斯克银行、德意志银行等涉嫌转移数十亿美元可疑资金的丑闻），但放眼全球，通过物理走私现金的规模动辄达数千亿美元，传统银行渠道的洗钱量与现金走私相比完全不是一个量级。 - 全球每年反洗钱合规支出约 2000 亿美元，足以消除全球饥饿并普及清洁用水与卫生设施。 - 现金与不记名票据在全球非法财富转移中仍占据庞大规模，每年全球现金走私额高达数千亿美元。 ### `12:35` “以物代钱”：规模上万亿的贸易型洗钱 比现金走私更为庞大且更难追踪的，是贸易型洗钱（Trade-Based Money Laundering, TBML）。这种模式本质上不是在跨境转移货币，而是在转移“物资”和浓缩价值。例如，要将资产转移出境，通过虚高或压低进出口商品的发票、甚至运送高仿名牌服装或普通工业制成品，远比在银行系统内直接转账容易得多。据华盛顿全球金融诚信组织（Global Financial Integrity）估算，全球每年通过贸易型洗钱转移的资产规模高达约 1 万亿美元。 这种“账目配平”的逻辑在毒品贸易中体现得尤为直接。假定每年有价值 500 亿美元的可卡因流入美国，毒贩绝非慈善家，为了平账，必定需要等值的价值逆向回流。据最佳估算，每年约有 250 亿美元以物理现金形式走私回墨西哥，而剩下 250 亿美元的账目缺口，则依赖实物贸易来补齐。美国出产的卡特彼勒（Caterpillar）推土机、约翰迪尔（John Deere）农用拖拉机等重型设备备受欢迎，直接被采购并运往墨西哥以平衡毒资账目；在欧洲，则是利用对中国市场庞大的奢侈品需求，通过走私古驰（Gucci）手袋、博柏利（Burberry）风衣等进入灰市。 犯罪分子的核心思维在于不断寻找“未被监管关注的浓缩价值形态”。最典型的就是昂贵的名表：在机场携带超过 1 万美元现金必须申报，但手腕上戴一块价值 100 万美元的名表，通关时几乎无人过问，直接飞抵目的地变现即可完成巨额价值跨境。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 贸易型洗钱与价值平衡链条 accDescr: 展示毒品输入美国后通过现金走私与农机设备等实物贸易实现价值回流与平账的过程 subgraph US["美国境内"] Drugs["流入价值 500 亿美元毒品"] CashGen["产生 500 亿美元非法现金收入"] Equip["采购浓缩价值物资<br/>(卡特彼勒/约翰迪尔农机等)"] end subgraph Mexico["墨西哥与境外"] Cartel["贩毒集团账目配平"] RealGoods["接收合法设备并变现/自用"] end Drugs --> CashGen CashGen -- "约 250 亿美元物理走私" --> Cartel CashGen -- "约 250 亿美元采购物资" --> Equip Equip -- "跨境实物运输 (TBML)" --> RealGoods RealGoods --> Cartel ``` ### `15:47` 毒资与换汇需求对接：解析“温哥华模型” 这种实物与价值的跨国匹配在涉及大额资金出境时演化得更加精巧。由于中国公民每人每年面临 50,000 美元的外汇便利化额度限制，海外富裕人群存在极其庞大的离岸外汇与现金需求。西方国家因毒品交易产生的天量非法现金，恰好为这种海外现金需求提供了现成的流动性供给。全球华裔地下钱庄网络在过去十年至十五年间迅速崛起，建立了一套将“富人海外现金需求”与“贩毒集团本地现金供给”完美匹配的撮合机制。在欧洲，这一合作对象往往是阿尔巴尼亚黑帮或意大利光荣会（'Ndrangheta）；在美洲，则主要对接墨西哥和哥伦比亚贩毒集团。 这一机制被执法部门称为“温哥华模型”（Vancouver Model）。最初，温哥华警方观察到极其困惑的一幕：富裕的赌客在赌场外接过来路不明的成袋大额现钞，走进赌场下注，然后迅速输光。传统的赌场洗钱模式是通过少量投注后兑换筹码变现以洗白资金，但温哥华发生的现象却是直接“亏钱”。 拉远视角便会发现，这实际上是一笔横跨多国的对冲闭环：中国富人在海外获取毒品黑帮提供的现金用于消费或豪赌，作为对价，富人将等值的人民币在国内转入地下钱庄控制的账户；与此同时，地下钱庄再通过毒品原料供应、跨境商品贸易或欧洲奢侈品灰市等多种贸易渠道，向贩毒集团结算货款。整个过程中，实际的法定货币完全没有发生跨国电汇，而是通过跨境物资流动与双向净额结算，完成了数十亿美元级资金的无痕洗白。 ### `20:00` 平行金融帝国：从美第奇家族账本到现代中国洗钱网络 现代洗钱网络构建起了一个规模庞大且运转高效的全球平行金融系统。以跨国犯罪为例，洗钱网络通过全球范围内的“三角贸易”完成价值闭环：普通商品或违禁品从中国运往南美洲，南美洲将可卡因运往欧洲，最终形成自给自足的物资与价值对冲。由于跨国银行电汇面临严格的合规与反洗钱审查，洗钱网络干脆彻底放弃在国际间直接转移货币，转而直接跨境转移“价值”本身——无论是通过奢侈品、普通集装箱货物，还是毒品等违禁品。正如嘉宾奥利弗·布洛（Oliver Bullough）所言，只要有犯罪存在，就必然存在洗钱需求，因为这是犯罪分子变现并保护非法利润的唯一手段。 从金融史的角度来看，这种模式与中世纪晚期至文艺复兴早期佛罗伦萨美第奇家族（Medici family）的银行业务如出一辙。美第奇家族当时建立了一套精密的跨国汇兑体系：商人在威尼斯或佛罗伦萨的分行存入资金，翻越阿尔卑斯山到达布鲁日或伦敦后，就能立刻在当地分行提取等额资金。当时在欧洲大陆长途押运金银极不安全，美第奇家族同样不运送实物金银，而是依靠商品贸易——将丝绸与香料向北运送，将英国的羊毛向南运送，再把真实的资金流动巧妙隐藏在繁复的贸易单据中。二战后学者在佛罗伦萨国家档案馆发现了美第奇家族当年的“秘密账本”（Secret Books），证实他们当年为教皇、红衣主教及各国政要提供保密银行服务的方式，与现代洗钱手法惊人一致。 这种基于贸易的价值对冲机制，如今已成为“中国洗钱网络”（Chinese Money Laundering Networks，简称 CMLN）的核心运作逻辑。布洛风趣地指出，反洗钱研究领域极其小众，“基本上就我和其他三个人”。在这一行里充斥着三字缩写（如 AML 代表反洗钱、CFT 代表打击资助恐怖主义），但一旦某项事物重要到必须动用四个字母的缩写（如 CMLN），“你就知道这绝对非同小可”。 - **洗钱核心原则**：不转移资金，仅转移价值（豪华商品、大宗商品或毒品），绕过国际银行合规电汇检查。 - **历史镜像**：文艺复兴时期美第奇银行利用羊毛、丝绸与香料进出口贸易的单据对冲，为政客与教廷隐藏现金流。 - **CMLN 的规模**：中国洗钱网络利用这种高度成熟的贸易清算方式，在全球地下金融中占据关键生态位。 --- ### `22:38` 节目插播：商业信赖基建与企业 AI 技能落差 播客中段插播了赞助内容与彭博商业科技简讯。在电商领域，PayPal 推出了面向智能代理商业（Agentic Commerce）的支付与品牌风控解决方案，旨在消除消费者在点击购买前因信任缺失产生的迟疑。 随后，彭博科技主播 Carol Masser 带来了《彭博科技一分钟》（Bloomberg Tech Minute）。根据商学院管理专业研究生录取委员会（GMAC）面向全球企业招聘人员的最新调查，尽管生成式 AI 备受瞩目，但全球企业并未在 2026 届商学院硕士及 MBA 毕业生中将 AI 技能列为首要考察对象。雇主目前最看重的技能依然是传统的“沟通能力、问题解决能力与适应力”，AI 工具技能在技能需求榜单中排在后三分之一。受访招聘主管普遍认为当前商学院在 AI 教学方面表现欠佳，毕业生技能准备不足，尽管他们预计 AI 技能在未来五年将显著提升重要性。目前大多数企业对招聘人员的 AI 核心诉求仍局限于“自动化日常重复工作”。此外，协作平台 Asana 在随后的播客广告中主打将人类与 AI 智能体编排入同一工作流的操作系统模式。 --- ### `25:13` 旋转木马诈骗：利用增值税漏洞榨取国库的“无限提款机” 随后话题转向基于贸易的洗钱与欺诈案件，主持人提到了在英国及欧洲臭名昭著的“旋转木马诈骗”（Carousel Fraud），又称“欧盟内部失踪交易商欺诈”（Missing Trader Intra-Community Fraud，缩写为 MTIC，同样符合“四字顶级金融罪行”的定律）。这种骗局的设计极其繁复精巧，布洛感叹道：“如果那些犯罪分子将这种设计交易的才智用来解决气候变化，这个问题早就被彻底解决了。” 该犯罪滋生于欧盟增值税（VAT）系统的制度缺陷：商品在一国内部流通时必须征收增值税，但跨国转口贸易为了避免多国税务机关互不信任，被设定为零税率。犯罪团伙正是利用跨国免税与国内征税之间的制度套利疯狂作案。整个流程如同旋转木马般周而复始：首先从爱尔兰免税进口一批商品（如手机等小体积高价值货物）到英国，随后英国的进口壳公司将其平价或略微加价转卖给团伙控制的第二家英国壳公司，并在账面上加收 20% 的增值税。接着，第二家公司将这批货物重新出口回爱尔兰，并凭借出口单据向英国财政部（HM Treasury）全额申请退还这 20% 的进项增值税。与此同时，原本应当向英国政府缴纳那 20% 增值税的第一家公司（即所谓的“失踪交易商”）早已凭空消失、拒不交税。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 旋转木马增值税诈骗流程图 accDescr: 展示失踪交易商欺诈如何通过跨国免税与国内退税套取国库税款 subgraph CrossBorder1["跨国输入"] A["爱尔兰关联方"] -->|"零税率免税进口"| B["失踪交易商<br>(英国公司 A)"] end subgraph Domestic["英国境内转手"] B -->|"境内销售<br>虚增 20% 增值税"| C["出口代理商<br>(英国公司 B)"] B -.->|"应当缴税却直接人间蒸发"| D[("英国国库<br>分文未收")] end subgraph CrossBorder2["申请退税与循环"] C -->|"转售出口回爱尔兰<br>(完成一圈闭环)"| A C -->|"凭出口单据<br>申请 20% 全额退税"| D D ==>|"国库直接倒贴现金"| C end ``` 这种犯罪在 20 世纪 90 年代由英国的手机销售商偶然发现并迅速工业化，成为犯罪团伙眼中能源源不断下金蛋的“金鹅”。MTIC 诈骗与普通黑帮犯罪存在一个本质区别：普通黑社会需要争夺毒品地盘、争夺买家，存在残酷的零和博弈；而旋转木马诈骗的目标是直接抢劫国家财政部，国库资金池理论上是无限的。犯罪团伙之间完全没有竞争动机，反而合作程度越高、串联的空壳公司链条越长越复杂，能够从政府骗取的退税款项就越庞大。英国早期通过整合海关、税务、警方等多部门联动作战，成功遏制了本土的旋转木马诈骗，并被布洛作为打击金融犯罪的正面典范写入新书；然而，由于各法域之间缺乏统一监管，这一犯罪网络随即大规模转移至欧洲大陆，如今已演变为横跨立陶宛、葡萄牙、希腊等国、每年给欧盟造成高达 500 亿欧元损失的顽疾，多名诈骗操盘手甚至因此登上过英国富豪榜。 ### `30:00` 增值税“失踪交易商”骗局：凭空捏造出的暴利 在增值税欺诈（又称旋转木马骗局，Carousel Fraud）的操作中，犯罪分子钻了税制规则的核心漏洞：跨境进口商品时无需预付增值税，而在商品重新出口时却可以向税务机关申请退税。诈骗团伙在这条贸易链条中插入了一个关键环节——“失踪交易商”（Missing Trader）。这家中间空壳公司在境内销售商品并向买方收取了含税货款，却从未将应缴的税款上缴国库，随后人间蒸发；与此同时，链条末端的出口方则拿着合规的单据向财政部全额申领退税。其结果，相当于诈骗者凭空从空气中套取了整批货物价值20%的增值税退税款。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 增值税失踪交易商欺诈流程图 accDescr: 展示了从免税进口、境内转手截留税款到最终出口骗取退税的全过程。 subgraph ImportExport ["跨境流转"] A["境外供货商"] -->|"免增值税进口"| B["失踪交易商<br>(Missing Trader)"] D["境内出口商"] -->|"出口并向财政部<br>申请20%退税"| E["境外接收方"] end subgraph DomesticChain ["境内多层空壳洗钱流转"] B -->|"加价20%含税售出<br>(随后卷款失踪、不缴税)"| C["中间空壳缓冲公司"] C -->|"层层倒手开票"| D end ``` 这种手法给英国等国财政部带来了灾难性的资金流失。当时负责调查此事的保险理算员在向奥利弗·布洛（Oliver Bullough）回忆案情时，神情中甚至带着一种“物理学家在谈论欧洲核子研究中心（CERN）粒子对撞机时的敬畏与惊叹”。虽然理论机制看似只是两家皮包公司之间的买卖，但现实操作中却牵涉成千上万家空壳公司，数以亿计的货物在境内外被来回倒手、反复空转。当所有的账目轧差清算之后，20%的真金白银便被凭空创造出来落入犯罪分子腰包，而账单全部由纳税人买单。正如布洛所感叹的：“如果你喜欢犯罪，这真是一桩华丽的罪行（a gorgeous crime）。”但这桩罪行不仅极度危险、成本极其高昂，也让一大批穷凶极恶之徒迅速跃升为全英国最富有的人群。 --- ### `31:07` “纸币悖论”：数字时代下反常激增的现金印钞量 面对洗钱犯罪对大额现金的猖獗滥用，主持人提出了一个关键疑问：既然各国政府对这些洗钱载体心知肚明，官方究竟是出于何种理由，仍在源源不断地印制巨额现金、尤其是超大面额纸币？布洛指出，这正是金融界著名的“纸币悖论”（Paradox of Banknotes）。该现象最早在2009年由时任英格兰银行首席出纳官（负责监管实物硬币与纸币发行）、现任行长安德鲁·贝利（Andrew Bailey）正式提出并命名。 从技术属性来看，纸币本质上是一种类似于录像带（VHS）或胶卷相机的“模拟时代产物”（Analog Technology），在日常消费中早已被信用卡、电子转账等数字化支付手段无情碾压。目前英国日常交易中仅有约9%使用现金，美国也仅占13%左右。按照正常的市场供需逻辑，当全社会的日常交易需求出现雪崩式萎缩时，纸币的供应量也应当断崖式下跌。然而现实却截然相反： - **反常的激增趋势**：在全球几乎所有主要经济体中，流通中的现金总量非但没有萎缩，反而持续刷新历史最高纪录。 - **庞大的存量数字**：美国流通中的现金已逼近甚至超过2万亿美元（布洛原本期盼能在建国250周年之际突破2万亿，认为那具有某种极客式的仪式感）；欧元区流通纸币达1.6万亿欧元左右；英国也有约1000亿英镑。 - **破产的传统解释**：贝利在2009年曾提出三种假说来解释这一反常现象——一是当时的低通胀与极低利率，持有现金几乎没有机会成本（存入银行也拿不到利息）；二是ATM自动取款机数量大增，纸币只是堆积在ATM机里备用；三是2008年全球金融危机刚过，公众对商业银行体系缺乏信任。 然而十几年过去，这些假说已被现实逐一击破：ATM机在全球范围内不仅没有增加，反而在大幅撤减；通胀早已反弹走高；公众对金融机构的信心也有所恢复。可是纸币激增的势头不仅没有减缓，反而变本加厉——自贝利2009年发表讲话以来，英国流通中的英镑纸币总面值直接翻了一番。 --- ### `33:28` “价值储存”的掩耳盗铃：人均七千美元去哪儿了？ 在传统解释失效后，各国央行官员往往退守到教科书式的基本教条中：货币无非具有两大功能——“交易媒介”或“价值储存”。央行便顺理成章地宣称：既然现金不再被作为交易媒介使用，那它必然是在被用作“价值储存手段”。 布洛对这种避重就轻的说辞感到极为沮丧，因为央行自己展开的民意调查早已推翻了这个论调： - **巨大的数据鸿沟**：调查显示，普通美国成年人身上或家中存放的应急现金平均只有约430美元。然而将全美流通的美元现钞除以总人口，算上所有男女老少，人均流通量高达7000多美元。官方所谓被普通家庭用于“储蓄/存钱”的现钞规模，与市场上实际在外流通的现钞总量差了整整一个数量级。 - **跨国推卸责任**：美联储经济学家露丝·贾德森（Ruth Judson）以及欧洲央行的研究人员试图从海外流通寻找答案。欧洲央行估算约有50%的欧元纸币流向了欧元区以外，而美联储则估计高达65%的美元纸币漂泊在美国境外。 但布洛指出，把纸币推给海外市场不过是在将问题“往后踢了一脚”。即便这批纸币是在境外充当所谓的“价值储存”，它们究竟在被谁使用、为何使用？各国央行对此始终闪烁其词，从不正面回答。这就像是“奈飞（Netflix）和迪士尼+（Disney+）已经彻底普及，流媒体大红大紫，然而VHS录像带的工厂产量却一年高过一年连破历史纪录”。如果发生在录像带行业，所有人都会打破砂锅问到底：究竟是谁在看这些录像带？但只因为涉及的是钞票，央行便一句轻描淡写的“大概是价值储存吧”，让全社会对此视而不见。 --- ### `35:10` 铸币税的秘密：从封建领主特权到两万亿无息贷款 在剖析大额纸币为何难以撼动时，对话引向了一个深奥却核心的概念——铸币税（Seigniorage）。布洛解释，该词源自诺曼法语中的“*seigneur*”（意为封建领主或君王），它清晰记录了一段古老的历史：只要封建军阀占领一块土地自立为王，第一件事必然是确立垄断铸币的特权。在盎格鲁-撒克逊时期的英格兰，许多地方割据军阀在历史长河中唯一留下的痕迹，就是几枚刻有他们名字的硬币。当时任何人想将贵金属制成货币，必须送往领主的造币厂，领主在打上自己头像的同时扣留一小部分金属作为“报酬”，这便是原始的铸币税。 发展到现代纸币体系，铸币税的理解可以分为“浅显但并不准确”与“复杂但真正正确”两种视角： - **浅显但不准确的视角（造纸毛利率）**：印制一张100美元面值的纸币，物理成本仅需大约9美分。若以面值发行出去，每印一张就能净赚99.91美元，毛利率高达99.91%。按全球在外流通的百元美钞总量计算，这看起来是一门利润惊人的买卖。 - **复杂但真正正确的视角（政府无息贷款）**：央行官员会纠正上述看法，因为公民从银行取出纸币并非买断，而是随时能以相同面值兑换回账户资产。因此，流通中的实物钞票本质上是全体持有者向政府提供的一笔“无息贷款”（Interest-Free Loan）。 - **利息节约的惊人算盘**： - 目前流通在外的实物美元大约有2.5万亿美元，这就相当于美国政府凭空获得了一笔2.5万亿美元的无息负债。 - 面对当下已逼近40万亿美元的美国国债总额，这2.5万亿美元相当于占整体债务约6%的无息份额。 - 目前美国联邦预算中债务利息支出已占到总预算的约19%左右。如果这额外的2.5万亿美元也需要按照市场利率支付国债利息，联邦政府的偿债负担还将再凭空攀升整整一个百分点。 无论从哪一种视角来看，铸币税对政府财政而言都是一块无法割舍的巨大肥肉。它要么是一场利润极高的特许经营，要么是一种成本极低、完全免息的举债融资手段。 --- ### `37:25` 官僚孤岛与巨大利益：为何百元大钞难以废除？ 既然大额纸币滋生了惊人的跨国犯罪，那么从政治层面上，究竟是谁在阻挠废除百元大钞？主持人调侃道，究竟是财政部与央行在誓死捍卫铸币税收益，还是一种单纯的行政惯性，亦或是某些依赖大额现金避税的行业——比如“纽约庞大的美甲沙龙和通灵算命师利益游说集团”在暗中作祟？ 布洛分析认为，现实情况甚至比游说集团阻挠更为荒诞：这个议题在核心决策层内部“根本就不会被提上议程”。 在美联储、欧洲央行、英格兰银行或加拿大央行等机构的视角下，现行货币系统运转得无比完美——市场对其产品（大额纸币）有着无穷无尽且持续增长的旺盛需求，源源不断地为财政输送低成本资金，官方没有任何内在动力去自断财路、淘汰自己的明星产品。 尽管从宏观视角审视，这些大额纸币在客观上充当了地缘政治级别犯罪网络的支撑工具，犯罪行为给全社会造成的破坏与外部成本，早已远远超过了财政从铸币税中获取的收益。但悲哀的现实在于，反洗钱执法部门与负责发钞的财政部、央行分属不同的政府机构，彼此处于严重的“信息孤岛”（Silos）。管印钞与管算账的官僚，从来不需要去承担缉毒防恐部门面对的社会代价，部门之间缺乏顺畅的沟通与问责，最终使得百元大钞在多方默认的系统惰性中继续大行其道。 ### `40:00` 大额纸币的废除困境与国际洗钱的“集体行动难题” 大额纸币长期以来因其便携性和高价值成为犯罪活动与恐怖主义的首选工具。在 2016 年巴黎发生恐怖袭击事件后，欧洲央行宣布停止印制 500 欧元纸币。在民间，500 欧元纸币曾被戏称为“本·拉登”（the Bin Laden）——因为每个人都听说过它，却几乎没人真正亲眼见过它。嘉宾奥利弗·布洛（Oliver Bullough）幽默地指出，一旦某种纸币被冠上这种绰号，就说明发行方已经陷入了相当严重的公关和监管困境。新加坡过去也曾发行过面额高达 10,000 新元的大钞，后来同样选择将其废除以遏制非法金融活动。 然而，对于全球流通量极大的 100 美元纸币而言，单方面废除面临着典型的“集体行动难题”（collective action problem）。如果美国停止印制 100 美元纸币——除了那些在 MV 里挥舞大把美钞的嘻哈说唱歌手可能会感到不便之外，真正受到打击的只有犯罪分子——国际洗钱市场并不会就此萎缩。由于欧洲仍在印制 100 欧元和 200 欧元纸币，瑞士有 1,000 瑞士法郎，英国有 50 英镑大钞，犯罪集团只会迅速转用欧元等其他货币。这样一来，美国不仅无法削减地下犯罪经济，反而会白白将宝贵的“铸币税”（seigniorage）拱手让给欧洲央行。 更深层的阻碍在于反洗钱机制中“利益与危害错配”的经济现实。为非法资金提供中转通道和金融基础设施的地区（如伦敦金融城或发行全球通用货币的美国），往往能从庞大的金融沉淀与交易中获得丰厚利润；而犯罪活动带来的毒品蔓延、暴力动荡等毁灭性恶果，却由墨西哥、哥伦比亚等下游国家来承担。著名经济学家肯尼斯·罗格夫（Kenneth Rogoff）曾长期疾呼废除大面额纸币并撰写专著探讨其危害，但因为无法让全球所有央行统一行动，这项提议在现实博弈中屡屡碰壁。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 大额纸币废除的集体行动困境 accDescr: 展示若单一国家废除大钞，犯罪分子会流向其他货币，导致该国损失铸币税而洗钱未被遏制的死结。 subgraph Problem["单边废除假设"] A["美国单方面停印 $100 美元纸币"] --> B["地下网络转向替代大钞<br>(如 200 欧元 / 1000 瑞郎)"] B --> C["全球洗钱与犯罪总量未见减少"] end subgraph Asymmetry["利益与危害不对称"] D["发钞国与金融中心：<br>坐收铸币税与金融交易中介利润"] E["犯罪受害国 (如墨、哥)：<br>承受黑金、贩毒与暴力破坏"] end C --> F["国际协调死结：缺乏统一弃用大钞的动机"] D --> F ``` - **500 欧元绰号**：“本·拉登”（Bin Laden），形容其闻名遐迩却极难在合规日常消费中得见。 - **废除尝试**：欧洲停印 500 欧元；新加坡废止 10,000 新元纸币。 - **肯尼斯·罗格夫（Kenneth Rogoff）**：长年呼吁逐步淘汰实物大钞以打击逃税和有组织犯罪的经济学家代表。 --- ### `45:00` 加密货币、稳定币与街头现金的“双层洗钱结构” 话题转向新兴支付手段时，主持人和嘉宾聊到中国人民币的最高面额仅为 100 元（约合 15 美元），且票面正面统一印制毛泽东头像，相比多面额国家显得尤为独特。随后主持人提出疑问：过去人们常争论加密货币是否会彻底取代现金成为洗钱主力，在现实中加密资产到底有没有真正改变洗钱生态？ 布洛强调，加密货币在洗钱领域的规模极为庞大，但其中真正起核心作用的是稳定币（Stablecoins）。历史上美第奇家族曾通过跨境运输羊毛、商品来抵消账目；现代贩毒集团也会将可卡因与卡特彼勒（Caterpillar）大型工程机械或奢侈品手袋混搭进行“基于贸易的洗钱”（trade-based money laundering）。稳定币的出现，使这种跨国价值转移变成了瞬间完成的链上结算。当今最具创新能力的洗钱网络（包括俄罗斯、中国及伊朗的地下洗钱公会）开创了一套成熟的“现金加加密货币”组合模式： 1. **街头末端使用现金**：现金在基层零售和贩毒街头依然不可替代，但它体积极其庞大、气味难闻、清点费时且携带极不安全。 2. **中间层快速代换**：地下钱庄收集大量街头零散现金后，迅速在当地将其兑换为稳定币。 3. **跨境瞬间清算**：借助加密网络，资金被瞬时转移到世界各地（如向哥伦比亚供货商采购原料），彻底摆脱实物现钞跨境走私的高昂风险。 为了摆脱西方对主流稳定币的监管与冻结控制，俄罗斯甚至尝试开发本国的加密货币体系（如 A7、A5 等尝试），尽管目前遭遇了一些挫折，但这反映出跨国犯罪主体正在系统性地利用链上资产规避传统制裁与审查。 --- ### `47:30` 为什么 100 美元仍是全球黑金的“通用语言”（Lingua Franca） 当被问及犯罪集团在持有货币时是否会像专业外汇交易员那样进行汇率对冲（例如因看空美元而主动减持、换入欧元）时，布洛结合自己早年在俄罗斯担任记者的经历作出了分析。在俄罗斯工作时，金融犯罪线索几乎无处不在。当时普通俄罗斯人对美元和欧元的相对强弱确实非常敏感，一度由于欧元走强而倾向于兑换欧元。甚至在民间黑市上，不同版面、不同面额的美元现金兑换卢布的汇率都不尽相同——由于百元大钞的巨大需求，一张 100 美元的兑换率往往显著高于同等金额的 20 美元零钞。 然而，对于跨国犯罪组织的大规模运作而言，决定货币选择的核心因素并非短期的汇率投机，而是极致的“流动性”与“全球通用性”。 - **体积优势 vs 通用优势**：尽管 200 欧元纸币在同等空间下能携带相当于美元两倍的价值，但 100 美元凭借其深厚的历史积累，享有无可比拟的“先发优势”（first-mover advantage）。 - **深层流动性**：无论在世界哪一个偏远角落，100 美元都能无条件被认可并立即兑现；围绕美元构建的金融工具、地下清算网和信任机制极其坚固。 这种现象与美元在合法全球经济中的霸权地位形成了惊人一致的镜像：由于市场深度最深、流动性最好、网络效应最强，一旦确立了全球基准地位，任何竞品货币都极难将其撼动。因此，100 美元纸币迄今依然稳坐全球地下经济与跨国犯罪“通用语言”（lingua franca）的宝座。 ### `50:00` 莱特·帕特曼的遗产与现代反洗钱的制度性瘫痪 在谈及当下的政治气候与反洗钱监管为何缺乏变革动力时，奥利弗·布洛（Oliver Bullough）借机引出了自己心目中的“反洗钱英雄”——得克萨斯州民主党众议员莱特·帕特曼（Wright Patman）。帕特曼在 1928 年至 1974 年间长期代表得州东北部的特克萨卡纳（Texarkana），是 19 世纪末得州、南部及中西部平民主义运动（Populist movement）孕育出的一位典型“不完美但令人赞叹”的南部民主党人。他骨子里对金融机构与垄断力量抱有极度健康的怀疑态度。20 世纪 60 年代，正值离岸金融蓬勃兴起之际，帕特曼凭借众议院银行委员会主席的显赫威望与当年国会森严的层级结构，力排众议举行听证会，凭一己之力推动并催生了《银行保密法》（Bank Secrecy Act）。布洛将帕特曼当年的角色类比为金融危机后伊丽莎白·沃伦（Elizabeth Warren）对消费金融监管的推动，但他悲观地指出，今天国会中早已难觅这类愿意深入钻研洗钱细微机制、并具备足够政治声望的政客。 现行体制的最大弊病在于政客们选择“甩手卸责”（punt responsibility），将所有合规重担全推给银行，逼迫它们无休止地提交成千上万份可疑交易报告（STR），却从未真正审视洗钱的本质：罪犯到底如何利用加密货币、爱马仕手袋或巨型推土机转移资产？这种现状导致了高昂且极具侵入性的恶果，其中最残酷的副产品便是“去银行化”（Debanking）——全球成千上万无辜者（特别是穆斯林群体）因此被切断合法金融服务。布洛充满愤慨地指出，这种监管是彻底“倒行逆施”（ass backwards）的：一方面，政府强加给金融机构和纳税人沉重的合规成本，却未对犯罪分子造成任何实质阻碍；另一方面，政府又在日夜不停地印制近乎无限量的百元大钞，亲手为罪犯提供了绕开银行监控、畅行无阻的完美工具。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 现代反洗钱系统失效闭环 accDescr: 展示银行合规成本、政府执法脱节与罪犯利用现金漏洞之间的恶性循环 subgraph Cost["合规负担与无用功"] A["金融机构合规人员"] -->|"耗费巨资排查"| B["数以万计的可疑活动报告 SAR"] B -->|"缺乏资源审阅"| C["流入执法部门的'信息黑洞'"] end subgraph Disincentive["畸形的激励与惩罚"] C --> D["漏报面临数亿美元巨额罚款"] C --> E["合规正确收益为零"] end subgraph Loophole["现实漏洞与倒行逆施"] F["央行无限制印制大额纸币"] -->|"提供现钞逃避监管"| G["犯罪分子无成本洗钱"] G -.->|"难以阻断"| A end ``` ### `53:30` 可疑活动报告的“黑洞”与畸形的合规激励 针对如何改变银行合规体系激励机制的提问，布洛剖析了可疑活动报告（SAR）最初的构想与如今荒诞现实之间的巨大鸿沟。该制度起源于 1989 年巴黎 G7 峰会成立金融行动特别工作组（FATF）时的构想，初衷是为执法部门提供“实时情报流”，让警方能够当场看清洗钱行为的发生过程。然而，要实现这一设想，执法机构必须拥有足够的专业人员和高效的软件系统来分拣报告并迅速采取行动。现实却是，全球没有一个国家为执法机构配备了匹配其报告数量的资源，导致海量报告沦为直接填入“黑洞”的无用废纸，偶尔才会被翻出来看上一眼。 对于银行体系而言，这种合规机制的激励体系完全失衡且充满负外部性： - **惩罚极度严苛**：只要漏检一起案件被监管机构抓到，银行将面临 10 亿美元起步的巨额天价罚单。 - **正向激励缺失**：金融机构无论正确筛查出多少可疑交易，都不会得到任何实质性奖励，是典型的“毫无收益，全是对冲下行风险”。 - **机械性文书劳作**：迫使银行雇佣数以万计的合规专员，成天在地下室机械地处理海量的假阳性与假阴性误报，做着繁琐枯燥的官僚流程。 布洛强调，理性的改革应当是“大幅减少报告数量，确保每一份报告都被执法人员认真审读”。反洗钱的根本目标本该是“剥夺经济犯罪的获利空间”，让资金跨境移动的成本高到无法承受。然而，当前的现实却是把所有成本转嫁给社会与银行，除了偶尔开出惩罚性罚单，对打击幕后金融罪犯几乎毫无作为。 ### `56:15` 主持人复盘：多步骤拆解、稳定币套利与空间价值密度 在送别奥利弗·布洛后，节目主持人乔·威森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）与特雷西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）就对话中的核心洞察展开了延伸探讨。乔惊叹于金融犯罪者展现出的“惊人创造力”，比如旋转木马增值税欺诈（Carousel fraud），罪犯在税收系统中找到了如同“无限免费印钱外挂”般的漏洞，通过进口商品、虚假流转后申请退税，并跨越数千家空壳公司进行复制。特雷西则调侃道，虽然这让人暴富，但罪犯每天的日常居然是枯燥无味地注册空壳公司和填写税务文书，看似拥有巨额财富，却过着毫无意义感的生活。 两位主持人随后重点剖析了非法金融流动的底层逻辑与前沿形态： - **双边交易的多步骤拆解**：许多看似简单的双边交易（例如用比特币买下一幅名画），本质上与文艺复兴时期的美第奇银行体系异曲同工。它并非一步到位，而是由三步组成的复合流程：先从实体购买比特币，通过交易所转移到对方钱包，对方为了避险再迅速抛售换回法币现金。罪犯正是利用这种交易的“积木化”拆解，在层层步骤的脆弱缝隙中隐匿行踪。 - **稳定币与铸币税的合谋**：让特雷西感到意外的是，当下的加密货币洗钱主力并非高波动的比特币，而是稳定币。这也映射出地缘政治层面的深层讽刺：稳定币储备大量配置了美国国债，实际上在为美国政府债务提供融资，这使得监管部门在根本利益上缺乏动力去彻底扼杀这一实际上充当“政府低息乃至无息贷款”的灰色工具。 - **每单位空间体积的美元价值**：犯罪学与洗钱经济学中存在一个主流经济学鲜少提及的关键指标——“空间体积密度”（Dollar value per unit of spatial volume）。无论是价值连城且体积小巧的劳力士金表，还是面额达 100 美元乃至 200 欧元的纸币，洗钱者偏爱它们的终极逻辑，永远是在极小物理空间内浓缩最高的资产价值，从而以极低物流摩擦完成跨境转移。 ### `01:00:00` 价值密度与货币起源：从笨重沙发到高价值微小载体 在讨论洗钱载体的物理属性时，主持人们展开了关于“价值密度”的趣味对比与反思。主持人幽默地指出，高价值密度物品的对立面大概是“一张巨大的沙发”，如果要试图用一张庞大的沙发来转移财富，不仅笨重不堪，在实际操作中也极其低效。相反，市场始终存在一种强烈的商业诉求——去创造大量体积极小却价值连城的微型载体。这一逻辑恰好促使人们回溯到货币诞生的最初源头，正如人类早期使用珠宝、贵金属和宝石作为一般等价物一样，洗钱网络对体积微小但价值极高的载体的追求，本质上是对货币原生功能与古老形态的回归。 - **体积与价值的悖论**：高效转移财富的核心在于高“价值密度”，笨重而低价值密度的生活大件（例如巨型沙发）在转移和洗钱过程中毫无效率。 - **回归货币原点**：追求极高便携性与极高价值的微缩载体（如珠宝、宝石等），与人类历史上最早的货币形态及其演进逻辑完全一致。 --- ### `01:00:17` 节目收官、制作团队鸣谢与社群互动 讨论告一段落后，主持人特蕾西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）与乔·威森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）正式为本期《Odd Lots》播客画上句号。两位主持人分别分享了各自的社交平台账号，并向辛勤操刀本期节目的幕后制作团队致谢，包括制作人卡门·罗德里格斯（Carmen Rodriguez）、达希尔·贝内特（Dashel Bennett）、凯拉·布鲁克斯（Kaila Brooks）以及凯文·洛萨诺（Kevin Lozano）。 特蕾西与乔随后向听众介绍了获取更多节目内容的途径与社群互动方式。听众可访问彭博社网站收听往期全量剧集并订阅通讯，或加入全天候开放讨论的 Discord 官方社区，随时探讨金融、宏观经济与金融犯罪等热点话题。最后，主持人呼吁喜爱金融犯罪题材的听众在各大播客平台留下好评，并提示彭博订阅用户可以通过 Apple Podcasts 上的彭博频道收听完全免广告的纯净音频版本。 - **主持人社交账号**：特蕾西·阿洛威（@TracyAlloway）与乔·威森塔尔（@TheStalwart）。 - **制作团队名单**：卡门·罗德里格斯（@CarmenArman）、达希尔·贝内特（@Dashbot）、凯拉·布鲁克斯（@KaleBrooks）以及凯文·洛萨诺（@KevinLloydLozano）。 - **官方资源与社群入口**：彭博社官方节目专区（Bloomberg.com/OddLots）及 24/7 在线交流平台 Discord（discord.gg/OddLots）；彭博付费订阅者可在 Apple Podcasts 上尊享无广告收听权益。 --- ### `01:00:46` 赞助商播报：医疗整合、餐饮数字化与定制推广产品 本期节目尾声播出了三则赞助商广告。首先是医疗健康服务商 Optum，针对传统医疗中取药等候漫长、挂号困难等流程割裂的痛点，Optum 借助数据与现代科技打通病患护理与药房服务，旨在降低处方药费用、简化流程，提供以人为本的整体健康服务。其次是 Global Payments 旗下餐饮管理方案 Genius，该方案提供实时数字菜单与价格即时更新功能，告别传统重复打印菜单的困扰，保障前厅与后厨无缝协同，从容应对大型赛事客流或高峰期餐饮运营。最后是定制推广产品平台 4imprint，为企业提供包括品牌服饰、饮具、科技数码及帆布包等丰富推广产品，并提供免费样品、专业咨询和 360 度满意保障，助力品牌精准高效传递形象。 - **Optum 医疗系统**：通过数据科技打通就医护理与配药环节，减轻医疗繁琐流程，让处方药更实惠、获取更便捷（详情访问 business.optum.com）。 - **Genius by Global Payments**：为餐饮行业提供前后台协同解决方案，支持数字菜单与实时价格同步，确保菜品出餐流畅准时。 - **4imprint 推广定制**：覆盖各类高品质专属品牌服饰、数码产品与生活礼品，配备免费样品试用与 360 度服务保障（详情访问 4imprint.com）。 ## Notable quotes > `02:50` 我没赢，我只是说当晚我没有输光所有本金。 — Joe Weisenthal > `05:00` 如果犯罪经济占全球经济的份额现在与 1990 年代末完全相同，那就意味着自 90 年代末以来我们为打击洗钱所做的一切努力——那是极其庞大的工程——本质上除了阻止犯罪经济进一步扩张之外，几乎毫无建树。 — Oliver Bullough > `20:00` 基本上就我和其他三个人 — Oliver Bullough > `20:00` 你就知道这绝对非同小可 — Oliver Bullough > `25:13` 如果那些犯罪分子将这种设计交易的才智用来解决气候变化，这个问题早就被彻底解决了。 — Oliver Bullough > `30:00` 如果你喜欢犯罪，这真是一桩华丽的罪行（a gorgeous crime）。 — Oliver Bullough > `33:28` 奈飞（Netflix）和迪士尼+（Disney+）已经彻底普及，流媒体大红大紫，然而VHS录像带的工厂产量却一年高过一年连破历史纪录 — Oliver Bullough > `40:00` 因为每个人都听说过它，却几乎没人真正亲眼见过它。 — Oliver Bullough > `53:30` 大幅减少报告数量，确保每一份报告都被执法人员认真审读 — Oliver Bullough > `53:30` 剥夺经济犯罪的获利空间 — Oliver Bullough ## Mentioned Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, Austan Goolsbee, Oliver Bullough, Michel Camdessus, Andrew Bailey, Ruth Judson, Kenneth Rogoff, Wright Patman, Elizabeth Warren, Carol Masser, Carmen Rodriguez, Dashel Bennett, Kaila Brooks, Kevin Lozano, 彭博 (Bloomberg), Odd Lots, 芝加哥联邦储备银行 (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago), 美联储 (Federal Reserve), 国际货币基金组织 (IMF), 金融行动特别工作组 (FATF), LexisNexis, 汇丰银行 (HSBC), 丹斯克银行 (Danske Bank), 德意志银行 (Deutsche Bank), 全球金融诚信组织 (Global Financial Integrity), 卡特彼勒 (Caterpillar), 约翰迪尔 (John Deere), 古驰 (Gucci), 博柏利 (Burberry), 光荣会 ('Ndrangheta), 美第奇家族 (Medici family), PayPal, Asana, 英国财政部 (HM Treasury), 英格兰银行 (Bank of England), 欧洲中央银行 (European Central Bank), Optum, Global Payments, 4imprint, 《大家都爱我们的美元：洗钱如何大获全胜》（Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won）, 《银行保密法》（Bank Secrecy Act）, 温哥华模型 (Vancouver Model), 旋转木马诈骗 (Carousel Fraud / MTIC) ## Video description <p>Hardly anyone nowadays seems to carry much cash, never mind carrying around a bunch of $100 bills. So why does the amount of physical cash in circulation &mdash; especially big denominations like the $100 bill &mdash; keep increasing? There's a pretty obvious answer. All those dollars are being laundered and used by criminal enterprises. In this episode, we speak with journalist Oliver Bullough, author of <em>Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won</em>, about this cash paradox. We discuss how cartels balance their books by trading drugs for farm equipment, the gigantic parallel financial system that undergirds global money laundering networks, and why money laundering resembles Renaissance-era banking.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> [Source](https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/8a94442e-5a74-4fa2-8b8d-ae27003a8d6b/bbee8dff-1ad3-4ccd-b707-b4bb00f7df11/audio.mp3?in_playlist=982f5071-765c-403d-969d-ae27003a8d83)

[2:50] Joe Weisenthal: 我没赢，我只是说当晚我没有输光所有本金。 [5:00] Oliver Bullough: 如果犯罪经济占全球经济的份额现在与 1990 年代末完全相同，那就意味着自 90 年代末以来我们为打击洗钱所做的一切努力——那是极其庞大的工程——本质上除了阻止犯罪经济进一步扩张之外，几乎毫无建树。 [20:00] Oliver Bullough: 基本上就我和其他三个人 [20:00] Oliver Bullough: 你就知道这绝对非同小可 [25:13] Oliver Bullough: 如果那些犯罪分子将这种设计交易的才智用来解决气候变化，这个问题早就被彻底解决了。 [30:00] Oliver Bullough: 如果你喜欢犯罪，这真是一桩华丽的罪行（a gorgeous crime）。 [33:28] Oliver Bullough: 奈飞（Netflix）和迪士尼+（Disney+）已经彻底普及，流媒体大红大紫，然而VHS录像带的工厂产量却一年高过一年连破历史纪录 [40:00] Oliver Bullough: 因为每个人都听说过它，却几乎没人真正亲眼见过它。 [53:30] Oliver Bullough: 大幅减少报告数量，确保每一份报告都被执法人员认真审读 [53:30] Oliver Bullough: 剥夺经济犯罪的获利空间

[0:00] Oliver Bullough: If the scale or the share of the global economy that is criminal is the same now as it was in the 1990s, it means that everything we've done to try and tackle money laundering... has essentially failed to do anything except perhaps prevent the criminal economy from getting bigger.

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Never bet against American grit or American energy. Through innovation, Venture Global is not only building some of the largest energy facilities in the world right here in the United States but delivering American energy at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time So while others are busy talking we busy building That venture global That unstoppable energy Hello, OddLods listeners. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. We're the hosts of the Odd Lods podcast, and we've got something exciting for you. That's right. So one of the best parts of hosting our podcast is we get to actually meet and interact with our listeners. And we know we have some listeners over in Los Angeles. That's right. So if you're in L.A., we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood on September 17th. We have some really exciting guests lined up, have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at Bloomberg.com forward slash odd lots or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast I Tracy Allaway And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, everything I know about cash came from that tour we took of the Chicago Fed's cash facilities with its president, Austin Goolsby. That was really fun. I'm trying to think. What do you remember? I remember just seeing Lots and lots of cash, ink. I remember appreciating the smell of the cash. It has a very idiosyncratic smell. I remember the color of the cash, which you don't really notice all the different shades of dollar bills until you see them stacked up. Right. We just think of them as green. Yeah. Like pinks in there and oranges. Yeah, absolutely. Fifty shades of green. And then one thing that I remember is Austin actually telling us that 85 percent of the two point four trillion dollars in circulation happens to be one hundred dollar bills. Do you remember that? Yeah. And this is one of those sort of like facts about the world that people seem to know, but don't really think through it. It just sort of comes up every once in a while This phenomenon that you know by and large like two things I think people may know about the cash economy which is by and large people use less and less cash in their daily lives That fact seems to have actually had no effect on the amount of cash in circulation Right. It keeps growing. And then quite a bit of that cash in circulation is in relatively high denomination bills that are even used less than, say, the fives or the twenties. Yeah, I don't know about you, but I do not walk around with a lot of $100 bills in my pocket. No, me neither. On the rare occasions when I do go to a cash machine, I always choose $20s or even $5s and $10s, right? So the question is, what are people doing with all these $100 bills, right? And when we talked about it with Austin, he described it as a disconnect between the stats and the daily use of cash of most Americans. But I think there's kind of an obvious answer here, right? What are people doing with $100 bills? I have an answer because I can tell you the last time I walked around with a significant stack of $100 bills. Okay. I was playing in a poker game in New York City, and it was not a regulated poker game, and I didn't lose all my money that night. And so I walked home with a lot of $100 bills. So maybe that is a sort of – That's some good humble bragging, Joe, about winning at poker. I didn't win. I said I didn't lose all my money. [5:00] But maybe that's sort of a clue about the types of activities that might lend themselves to high denomination individual bills. Yes. So this episode is perhaps poker adjacent. We're going to be talking about money laundering, which we've never done an episode specifically devoted to money laundering. And it is, in fact, like a huge business. Some of the numbers you read about them and they're like staggering. And I almost like don't believe some of the numbers. But when you figure out it's like, OK, drugs are probably a big deal. Fraud is probably a big deal. Crime is a big deal. People are trying to get their money out of countries that have very sort of rigid capital controls. China being an obvious example. You can see how it adds up. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, money laundering is kind of the thing that makes a lot of crime possible, right? Like a lot of people wouldn't be in the crime business if they couldn't actually use the money they're generating from it. And money laundering is the way they're able to do that. So I think it's a worthy subject to dive into. I really want to learn more about how it all works. All right let do it We do in fact have the perfect guest We going to be speaking with Oliver Bullough He is a journalist and author of Everybody Loves Our Dollars So Oliver thanks so much for coming on All Thoughts And thanks for having me on the show I really pleased to be here Talk to us about the scale of money laundering because you sometimes hear these statistics thrown out, like bigger than the entire GDP of Germany, certainly bigger than a lot of big tech companies and things like that. How large are we talking about here? Well, it's worth saying in advance that obviously no one really knows. The criminals are not filing accurate tax returns. So there's a lot of supposition going on here. But the most widely used estimate is that we're talking about between two and five percent of global GDP. And since global GDP is approximately 100 trillion dollars, that means, you know, between two and five trillion dollars being laundered globally. And that's a pretty decent amount of money. You could build quite a lot of data centers with that. And that's growing all the time. I like how we measure everything in data centers now. How many data centers can you build? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if the criminals are building a lot of data centers. I mean, they are choosing almost any avenue they can find to launder their money. So perhaps that's the new, new thing. But the old things are still very much current. We're talking about, obviously cash money earlier And although we like to focus on shiny things crypto for laundering money I mean criminals are pretty traditional in a lot of the ways they move their cash So we are often talking about literal banknotes Do you have a sense of how that two to five percent number is derived? Because yes, we've seen that stat, et cetera. But also, as you've said, no one is filing these things in any sort of official manner. It's a lot of money. Do you have a sense of like why people think it's in that ballpark? That's a really good question. Actually, it derives from an estimate given by Michel Candesso, who was the head of the International Monetary Fund back in the late 90s, a French central banker. And he came up with this idea in the late 90s that it was between two and five percent of global GDP, which was based on a couple of economists work at the time trying to work out the size of the global economy. And it It was very much a guesstimate at the time. And it's been attacked from lots of different directions, trying to work it out in a sort of a macro way, looking at it in micro way, trying to work at various guesses. And people do keep coming back to this kind of a range. So the estimate that tends to be given is, yeah, two to 5% is the same estimate that was given in the late 90s which is it a kind of uncomfortable truth hidden in that estimate which is that if the scale or the share of the global economy that is criminal is the same now as it was in the 1990s, it means that everything we've done to try and tackle money laundering, which has been an awful lot since the late 90s, has essentially failed to do anything except perhaps prevent the criminal economy from getting bigger. Criminals have been able to to outmaneuver regulators and law enforcement agencies and governments attempts to limit them by a sort of ceaseless entrepreneurial nature ever since there have been attempts to stop them from laundering money. And the fact that their share of the global economy just grows alongside the global economy is proof of that. Yeah, the fact that it's growing in tandem with like broader economic growth. Absolutely. So, okay, what's going on with our efforts to actually tackle money laundering? Because I used to cover the banking industry. And one thing you would hear from banks all the time is how onerous KYC regulation, Know Your Customer regulation was, how terrible it was that they had to file thousands and thousands of like suspicious activity reports, lots and lots of complaints about everything they're doing to stamp out suspicious or illegal activity. But at the same time, per your commentary, it doesn't seem like it's actually been effective. It's obviously easy. [10:00] to dismiss what banks say as special pleading, but actually they do have a point. We have an incredibly intrusive and onerous system put in place to try and stop money laundering and terrorist financing, which was, I mean, it was created, the first AML legislation, a sort of rather weirdly named Bank Secrecy Act was passed back in 1970 in the US and then it spread globally when it became clear that one country couldn't fight money laundering on its own because it was pretty easy to just fly your banknotes to the Bahamas, Cayman Islands or Panama. And then, so it's pretty important to have their cooperation and then everyone had to cooperate. So we ended up from the late 80s, thanks to an institution called the Financial Action Task Force with a kind of global approach to tackling money laundering, which has become incredibly intrusive, incredibly expensive. The estimates from LexisNexis is that global compliance with AML legislation It costs something like $200 billion a year, which is a lot of money. I mean, if you look at what you could do with that money if you weren't using it for this, that would be enough to solve world hunger and to provide clean water and sanitation to everyone on Earth with about $50 billion left over. So it's a huge amount of money which is being spent on this economy. And a lot of that money is being spent by banks who are expected to check transactions to use ever more elaborate information. AI-powered compliance software, which they are... doing. They are attempting to do the job being asked of them. They face very large fines if they don't do that job. So it's fairly easy to see why they're doing it. But it's not working. The system that we have is incredibly laborious, very bureaucratic. It generates, as you say, millions upon millions of suspicious activity reports every year. But it is signally failing to stop the money launderers who are always at least one step ahead. So obviously, we really want to get into the But just to sort of set the scene a little bit, we started this conversation by talking about how much cash there is in circulation and the prevalence of high denomination bills. We're also talking about all the suspicious sort of incident reports that banks file. Big picture, I sort of have two questions. One is, what is the general sense of the distribution? How much is this happening via cash and bearer instruments that are hard to track? Headlines from time to time, a bank will get into really big trouble. HSBC got into trouble years ago. How much do we think is happening sort of? inside regulated financial institutions that didn't identify the illegal movement of money. Obviously, it is happening via regulated financial institutions. We know this because occasionally they get caught, whether that's Danske Bank or Deutsche Bank, HSBC, whoever. But if you look at the scale of global cash smuggling, and you compare that to the amounts that are even in these gigantic money laundering scams, which are accused of going through regulated financial institutions, it's just an absolutely different league. you billion dollars over several years for suspicious Russian clients. Global cash smuggling is certainly in the hundreds of billions annually. Cash is a hugely significant tool for moving illicit wealth around the world. And even that is dwarfed by what we refer to as trade-based money laundering. It is essentially a way of moving value around the world, not in the form of money at all, but in the form of stuff. If you are moving value out of China, it's far easier to do it in the form invoicing a shipment of manufactured goods or knock off designer clothes or whatever than it is to move it in the form of money at all. So there is a focus on the regulated sector banks. In particular, when we talk about money laundering for obvious reasons, because it's sort of easy to look in a spreadsheet and see value moving around. But actually, it's a far bigger deal if you look at how money is moved in the form of cash and how money is moved in the form of stuff. And that form of money laundering, trade based money laundering, is almost impossible. impossible to estimate. I mean, there is an institution in Washington, Global Financial Integrity, that estimates that that's about a trillion dollars a year. It's moved via trade-based money laundering. You know, we're talking about amounts of money being laundered outside the financial system that completely dwarfs what's happening within the financial system. Yeah. So one thing I learned from your book is there's a connection between drug money and, I guess, John Deere tractors and other equipment with the Mexican cartels, like essentially trading walk us through that particular example? How does this actually work? Well, you can see this. It's just logical that if there is, let's say, $50 billion worth of cocaine arriving in the United States every year. I've just invented that number, but it's a nice round number. So let's say it is that. [15:00] must be $50 billion of something else flowing in the opposite direction for the books of the cartels to balance. You know, they're not in this for charitable reasons. They like to make a living out of moving drugs. So that follows. Now, obviously, a significant amount of that is in the form of money. By best estimates, something like $25 billion worth of cash is smuggled into Mexico every year. But there's a significant hole in the books that needs to be filled with something. And it has been a traditional, that essentially a way of meeting that hole in the books just by exporting stuff. What does America make particularly? Well, I mean, Caterpillar tractors, John Deere tractors, that's useful. Everyone wants those. You can send them south. You can send all kinds of wonderful American financial products. We see this in Europe to a greater degree with luxury goods. There is a huge demand in China for European luxury goods, whether that's Gucci handbags or Burberry anorex or whatever. And so there is a giant off the books, a sort of grey market of designer goods which flow out of Europe into China. And in return, we receive criminal goods or drugs in return. So essentially anything that is being made well in one place, whether that caterpillar tractors or Gucci handbags can just be as useful a form of money as anything else I mean you need to just think about criminals as being endlessly looking for ways of finding concentrated value in a way that isn going to be checked so they can move it around. Obviously, the most useful example of that at all would be an expensive watch. If you buy a million dollar watch, you can fly in from one country to another and sell it at the other end. No one's going to check it when you fly across the world, sell it at the other end, and you've just moved a million dollars without having to move a million dollars. It's as simple as that. And it happens all the time, absolutely everywhere. It is kind of crazy that you have to declare like more than $10,000 in cash at the airport, but you could easily have a $1 million watch on your wrist. No one would think anything of that. Talk to us a little bit more about, all right, so Tracy asked about the Mexican trade of cocaine for tractors, which sounds reasonable enough. Talk to us about like how money is moved out of China, the popular ways to move money out of China at scale. You mentioned sort of watch and handbags, but what is the shape of this trade? The basis of the trade is that there is a restriction on moving money out of China of $50,000 per person per year. Now might sound like quite a lot to the average Chinese person but to a wealthy Chinese person that not nearly enough So there is a constant demand from wealthy Chinese people outside China for money that they can move in a formal way And so there is a huge appetite, a huge demand for cash, for some form of money. And now what they really need is a supply of money, which they can meet coming in the opposite direction. And then brokers can put those two together. And fortunately, in the West, we have created that supply of money by making drugs illegal. So there is a gigantic supply of cash which is being generated in an illegal way. And the Chinese money laundering networks, which have become incredibly sophisticated in the last, particularly the last 15 years, last 10 years, all over the world, essentially have created a business model of putting together this demand for cash that comes from wealthy Chinese people outside China. And the supply of cash that comes from the cartels or other drugs gangs in Europe, it's often the Albanians or the Andrangheta in Italy. And in the US, obviously, it would be more than the Mexicans or the Colombians. And they put these two together, the Chinese demand and the cartel supply. This is often called the Vancouver model, slightly unfairly, because it doesn't only happen in Vancouver. But it was first identified in Vancouver where you would get this totally baffled police officers watching this phenomenon of wealthy Chinese people being given carrier bags full of banknotes outside casinos going into the casinos and then just losing all the money because laundering money via casinos is something that been happening ever since the mob took over Las Vegas It's a super easy way of laundering money. You bet a little bit, you cash in your chips, then you sell the chips and you just have clean money. And so that's very tightly controlled, but they couldn't really understand what was happening because that wasn't what was happening in Vancouver. They were just taking in money and then losing it. But if you zoomed out, you would see that this one transaction of handing over the cash to a Chinese gambler was just a small fraction of what was really happening in that you had a debt being created essentially from the Chinese gambler to the drugs gang, which would be being repaid by supplying drugs to the drugs gang that they were able to sell to generate more cash, to hand over to generate more gambling. And so you end up with essentially a circular transaction where money would change hand in China between a criminal gang and a wealthy Chinese person. Money would change hands in Canada between a drugs gang, giving it to a Chinese person. And then essentially that would all net out by the movement of drugs between borders, which is how the value actually transfers. And you see this now. I mean, that's only like a bilateral trade, as it were, between Vancouver and China. But you see this now globally. So it might be the movement of luxury goods from Europe, the UK or France, to [20:00] China, then the movement of some kind of illicit goods or even totally normal goods from China to South America, then the movement of cocaine from South America to Europe, which would essentially complete this triangular trade. This happens globally on a truly colossal scale. And this is essentially how money is moved. You don't need to move money internationally because that's where the checks are on transactions. You just move value internationally in the form of luxury goods, cocaine or illicit goods of whatever kind. And so essentially, wherever you get criminality, there is a demand for money laundering, because this is how you realize and protect your criminal profits. And this essentially is a gigantic parallel financial system. And what I find particularly pleasing about this, of looking at this, is this is, pleasing is maybe not the word, but I'm kind of a nerd. Intellectually satisfying. Intellectually satisfying is this is exactly how the Medici's used to bank in the late medieval, early Renaissance Florence, is that they were moving wealth. They had an incredibly sophisticated system whereby you could deposit money at a branch of their bank in Venice or Florence, and then you could collect that same money in Bruges or in London and the other side of the Alps and the other end of Europe Essentially as soon as you could get there the money was available for you to pick up And you know how did they move the money They obviously weren moving bullion from Italy to Belgium or Italy to the UK for the same reason that ordinary people wouldn't want to do that. It wasn't safe. So they were just moving trade, so silk going north or spices, wool coming south, and then were just hiding the movement of cash in the paperwork. And, you know, in the years after World War II, some academics found their, what they were called their secret books in the state archive in Florence. and you could see how they were doing this. Essentially, they were providing banking services to politicians, to leading cardinals, other people in the church, in exactly the same way that banks might provide secret services now to politicians or any powerful people. And we're just hiding the transactions in the huge amount of paperwork generated by their trading activity. And this is basically now what the Chinese money laundering networks do. And you can tell that they're important. This is one of these weird things in money laundering studies, which is a very niche area, which is mainly just consists of me and about three other guys. But the money laundering studies, it is infested with acronyms. AML, anti-money laundering, CFT, counterfinance of terrorism. But if it's a really important one, it's a four-letter acronym, not a three-letter one. So the fact that Chinese money laundering networks are CMLNs it a four acronym You know that that a big deal Did you ever notice how you spend hours shopping online only to pause right before you hit buy now? That tiny hesitation, the one where you wonder if it is trustworthy, can make or break the sale. Now, with AI changing the way consumers discover and compare things, that split-second trust question matters more than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, PayPal has been a leader in online payments, and now they're at the forefront of agentic commerce, making it work for businesses, letting them maintain control of their brand and their customer relationships. 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Training in artificial intelligence tools ranked in the bottom third of the skills list, but recruiters did say AI-specific training will be more important in five years. On that, recruiters rated current graduates as only somewhat prepared or less to work with AI tools and said business schools are not doing a good job of teaching AI skills. Bottom line, according to the survey, what most companies want when it comes to AI skills is for candidates to be able to automate routine work. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com today by selecting work mode, available on plus and pro plans. This is Alexis Christophorus for Bloomberg Surveillance. AI is everywhere. Outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't [25:00] the workflows yet, the campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning. Those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready to go AI teammates, pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver. And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com. There does seem to be something very traditionalist about, I guess, trade-based money laundering. But on a related note, can you talk to us about the carousel fraud that was taking place going in and out of the UK? And then when the rules were finally changed, I think it just shifted over to Europe, which kind of gets at the point that it seems very hard to fix what is like a jurisdictional arbitrage issue unless you have some sort of harmonization across different countries Yeah the carousel fraud is one of these absolutely fascinating crimes which it so complicated and so extraordinary that you think that if the criminals had designed it if instead that they decided to set themselves to solving climate change or anything then that problem would be solved the kind of elaborate nature of the transactions they were doing. It grows out of a floor in the way that the value added tax is designed in the European Union. Back then the UK was in the European Union. And essentially the way it works is that if you're moving money, goods within a country, you charge value added tax. But if you move it between countries, you don't. So that difference had to be that way, because otherwise you would end up with the UK tax authority having to trust the French tax authority. And that's obviously never going to happen. So you had to have that zero rated transaction across borders, which just meant that you could cycle things in and out of one country and another country and essentially claim VAT that you'd never actually paid. And it went round and round and round. And that's why it's called carousel fraud. It went round like a merry-go-round. And it started off as just this very simple transactions. And then as the tax authorities picked up on that they became more and more complicated with different chains of shell companies going in all directions and incredibly complicated But yeah like you say what really interesting about it is the UK actually got very good at tackling this And I actually use it in the book as an example of how to fight financial crime. It was a really fully multi-agency approach, like not just leaving it to the banks like we do with money laundering, but really fighting it with everything that the state had. And actually got very good at tackling this, but it just crossed into the rest of Europe where now it's a 50 billion euro a year problem carousel fraud and it's so elaborate and so well developed that you're talking about something that spreads from lithuania down to portugal from from greece to to can you just explain can you explain the mechanics i get that it's elaborate but for the listeners like what is the mechanism this may be stretching the tolerance even of the odd lots to really explain but but so it's called so carousel fraud or missing trader into community fraud mtic which is a four-letter acronym so you can tell it's a big deal but basically what you have is if you import a product let's say from ireland if you're in the uk and then you don't pay vat on that trade because you've imported it right so no tax is paid you then sell it to an another shell company which is controlled by you but it looks like a different company in the UK you charge VAT on that trade So you add 20 or whatever the percentage is of that on that trade And then you export the good back to Ireland Now if the second company exports the good because they exported it, they can claim from the treasury, they can claim the 20% back again. They can claim that 20% because that's what they get because they've exported the good. So essentially, you export it, but without ever having paid it in the first place, you're essentially claiming back that that you never paid. So it's called missing trader into community fraud because the trader that is supposed to pay the VAT to the treasury just vanishes. They go missing and they never pay it. So you are claiming back a tax that has never been paid, which has this amazing ability, unlike almost all other forms of organized crime that I know of. Essentially, there is no limit to the amount of money that a criminal gang can make out of this. So there is no reason for criminal gangs to compete. The more they collaborate with each other, the more elaborate the schemes can get and the more money they can claim. So you ended up with this, essentially, it seems to have grown to been discovered by accident by mobile phone vendors in the 1990s, who then realized that there was this unbelievable golden goose that they could just keep milking, if that's what you do with geese, keep egging for golden eggs consistently. And they kept going for absolutely ages. I mean, you know, some of the carousel frauds just became on the British rich list. [30:00] the richest people in the country because they made so much money out of it. But essentially, the flaw in it is at the fact that you can import something without paying VAT, and then you can claim the VAT back when you export it. And provided that there is an extra stage in that transaction, the missing trader, the person who is supposed to pay the VAT never pays it to the treasury. The person who claims it back, claims it back. And therefore, you've essentially conjured up 20% of the value of a shipment from thin air. And this is why it became so expensive to the treasury. It is an incredibly elegant form of fraud. And talking to some of the insurance adjusters who were involved in trying to work out what on earth was going on, you know, they describe this with the sort of wonder that a physicist might talk about what's happening in CERN. Because I'm talking about only two shell companies, one selling it to another, then exports it. In reality, you're talking about thousands of shell companies moving goods backwards and forwards, up and down. And then when it all nets out, mysteriously, 20% of nothing has been created. And the rest of us are on the hook for it. It is a gorgeous crime, if you like crime. But it was incredibly troubling and very, very expensive and really made some bad people very wealthy. So obviously we touched on a number of different I guess vehicles for how money gets laundered What is the official reason for why given everything that we know governments continue to produce lots of cash and particularly high denomination units of currency? Yeah, I am fascinated by this is called the paradox of banknotes, what you described at the beginning. It was first identified formally by Andrew Bailey, now the governor of the Bank of England, back then the chief cashier, so in charge of physical coins and notes back in 2009. And it is this very strange phenomenon whereby cash is an analog technology like videotapes or films and cameras that is being outcompeted by digital means of payment. Really a very small proportion of transactions are now used cash. I think it's something like 9% now in the UK, maybe 13% in the US. It's very few. So there is very little demand for cash from society. So you would expect, therefore, the supply of cash to be collapsing. And yet at the same time that the demand is very low, for some reason, supply is very, very high and getting higher all the time. Consistently, almost everywhere, the amount of cash in circulation is hitting record highs in the US It almost 2 trillion US dollars in circulation I was hoping it would hit 2 trillion in time for the 250th anniversary because it would have had a sort of nerdy appropriateness but it didn quite get there. But still, it's not far off in the Eurozone. It's something like 1.6 trillion euros. In the UK, it's about 100 billion pounds. So, you know, huge quantities of banknotes are being printed, and yet very few are being used. And there have been a number of proposals, suggested explanations for why this is happening. Andrew Bailey back in 2009 suggested it could be because of low inflation, that there was no real opportunity cost of holding banknotes, because why bother putting them in the bank when interest rates are so low? Another explanation was there were just lots of ATMs. So maybe the banknotes were just, as it were, piling up in the ATMs, and that's where they were. Another explanation was trust in financial institutions was very low, because it was immediately after the great financial crisis. Yeah, I think we can say, certainly the number of ATMs is lower now than it was back then. And inflation has obviously gone up again. And you hope that the trust in financial institutions has at least partly returned in the last couple of decades. And yet the phenomenon has continued. In fact, it's accelerated, if anything, since then. The value of pounds in circulation, for example, has doubled since he made that speech So you know there is clearly another reason for it And central bankers tend to now just fall back on saying that it a store of value that there are two basic uses for money really It either a medium of exchange or it a store of value Those are the two options And since it's not being used as a medium of exchange, then they say, well, it's presumably being used as a store of value. And that's what they tend to come up with. And that's really frustrating because you can see from the surveys that central banks do that it isn't being used as a store of value. The average American adult has, I think, something like $430 odd either on their person or at home at any one time. And yet there's more than $7,000 out there for every man, woman and child in the United States. It's an order of magnitude higher than the amount that's being used as a store of value. And yet there is no attempt really by central bankers to explain why that's happening. You know, what's going on? Where are all the banknotes? I mean, they do efforts to try and work out how many of them are outside the country. There's an economist at the Fed called Ruth Judson, who's done some really interesting work on this, and then another colleague at the European Central Bank. And the European Central Bank reckons about half of euro banknotes are outside the eurozone. The Fed reckons sort of something like 65 percent maybe of dollar banknotes are outside the United States. But that's just a kind of a way of kicking the problem one step further. If it's a store of value outside the United States, it's still... [35:00] must be being used for something. And yet, what is it? Well, essentially, we don't know. They never really, the central bankers certainly never really answer that question of where are all this astonishing quantity of banknotes that they're printing. And it is a really interesting puzzle. I mean, if you imagine that this was not banknotes that we're talking about, but was VHS cassettes, that Netflix has boomed, everyone's watching Disney Plus, and yet somehow VHS cassette production is hitting record highs year after year after year. I think we'd be really interested in where they were going. Who's watching all these things? And yet, just because it's banknotes, everyone's like, oh, well, it's a store of value. Forget about it. Can you talk to us about seniorage? So this is one of these concepts where it comes up occasionally and I sort of nod my head and I go, yes, yes, of course, central banks make money by distributing dollars. But I don't actually know how it works. Well, so seniorage is one of these really ancient, wonderful concepts that I mean so what you can tell it's old because we use an actually Norman French word for it. Seigneurage means that which pertains to the seigneur or the lord which essentially is that making money having a monopoly on the production of money is a very profitable thing to have which is why almost as soon as any warlord kind of took over a patch of territory and declared himself to be king one of the first things they did was have a monopoly on issuing money And so there quite a lot of warlords in Anglo England that we only know the name of because we found a few coins with their names on. Essentially, in those days, it was that if you wanted to have your money coined, you had to bring it to the mint, where the king would put his face on it and take a little bit for his trouble. That's the origin of the term seignorage. But in the modern sense, Obviously, we don't use gold so much anymore. It's just paper. In the modern term, it's the profit that is made from issuing paper money. And there are two ways of looking at this. There's a sort of simple but wrong way and a right but complicated way. So the simple but wrong way of looking at this is that it's very cheap to print money. It costs about nine cents to print a hundred dollar bill. You know, there's whatever, 20 billion US dollar bills out there somewhere. So, you know, if you think about that, each one costs nine cents to print. You can see that there's a 99.9 percent, 99.91 percent margin on producing them. That's a very profitable thing. That's your seniorage right there. The fact that you're making $99.91 every time you print a hundred dollar bill. So that the simple but wrong way of looking at it And central bankers will tell you this is wrong because actually bill if you take bill out the bank you not actually buying that bill because you can sell it back at any time for the same amount that you bought it for So actually it an interest free loan to the government is what it really is And this is where we start getting towards very much the end of my maths. And I'm hoping that you guys will correct me at this point. So there's two and a half trillion US dollars out there somewhere. That's an interest free loan to the US government, broadly understood, of two and a half trillion dollars. Now, I think the US government debt, outstanding government debt is something like 40, almost $40 trillion now. So two and two and a half trillion dollars on top of that is like an additional, what is that sort of 6% or something of US government debt, which the US government isn't having to pay any interest on. That's quite a significant saving for the US government not to have to pay that money. I think that, as I remember rightly from the last thing I saw, I think that debt servicing now is something about 19% of the federal budget. If you had to pay interest on that extra two and a half trillion, then that's probably another percentage point on top of that. So that's quite a decent amount of money which the US government saves, essentially by having a chunk of its debt in the form of bearer instruments that don't pay interest. So that's, as it were, the right but complicated way of looking at senior rich But either way that you look at it senior rich is a very profitable thing to have which is why governments tend to like having a monopoly on the issuing of money because it essentially either it just straightforwardly profitable selling bits of paper or it a very cheap way of raising a loan. Right. So just to repeat Joe's question, then politically, who is actually blocking getting rid of, for instance, $100 bills? Would it be central banks and the Treasury protecting seniorage or is it simple inertia or is it maybe tax avoidant industries, the powerful nail salon and, I don't know, psychic reader in New York lobby or something like that? I think broadly speaking, this doesn't come up. The system from the perspective of the European Central Bank or the Fed or the Bank of England or the Bank of Canada, the system is working fine. There's lots and lots of demand for their products. Why would you want to get rid of them? If you look at it more broadly and you work out that essentially the products are enabling crime on a geopolitical scale, then you would say, well, actually, the harm that's being caused far outweighs the profits that's coming from the seniorage. We should do something about this. But, you know, essentially, these are different bits of government and they don't necessarily talk to each other. There have been occasions in the past when governments have got rid of big bills to try and reject. [40:00] criminality or terrorism. After the attacks on Paris in 2016, the Europeans announced that they weren't going to produce, they used to have a 500 euro bill, which was referred to colloquially as the Bin Laden, because everyone had heard of it, but no one had seen it. And by the time one of your banknotes has been called the Bin Laden, you know that you're in a degree of trouble. That's not a good nickname to have. Singapore used to have a big bill as well, I think a 10,000 euro bill, which they, a $10,000 bill, which they got rid of. But broadly speaking, you've got a kind of collective action problem, which is that if the US stops producing its $100 bill, and I wish it would, I don't think that there is anyone really who would be inconvenienced by the lack of $100 bills except the bad guys. But if they stop producing them, well, yeah, music video producers, I mean, I suppose what would hip hop artists wave around in their music videos. But leaving that aside, the Europeans would still be producing 100 euro and 200 euro banknotes. And then the Americans would then essentially lose out on the senior age to the Europeans and the criminal economy would get no smaller because they would just switch to using euros instead and vice versa. There are enough central banks producing big bills whether that a 50 pound note or a thousand franc note or 200 euros a hundred dollar bill that if one of them went out the game it essentially wouldn make that much difference to the criminals but would make a substantial difference to their own income from this So what you need is an international agreement that everyone could get together and say, we're not going to do this. And that's what has been eluding humanity. Well, in this, as in so many other ways, when it comes to trying to tackle financial crime, because if you are the person, jurisdiction that is enabling financial crime is actually quite profitable for you personally the city of london has been doing quite well out of this for decades and most of the harm is then spread elsewhere in the world so you get the profit and other people get the harm and the fact that the hundred dollar bills are the favored tool of the cartels in columbia and mexico is very bad for columbia and mexico but it's also quite profitable for the united states so that's the essential challenge is trying to persuade people that they all need to act together and that's something that well no one's really tried it but even the vague suggestions and some economists have talked about this in the past kenneth rogoff has talked about this at length and tried to get interest for that for this idea he's really come up against the challenge of trying to get everyone in a room together to agree This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Has the AI moment arrived at corporate offices worldwide? Not yet. And it's perhaps several years away. according to one survey of corporate recruiters who circle the world's business schools each fall and spring. Bloomberg's Rob Mandelbaum notes that according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, the skills recruiters sought most among 2026 graduates of business school master's programs, including MBAs, were communication, problem solving, and adaptability, which changed little from last year. Training in artificial intelligence tools ranked in the bottom third of the skills list, but recruiters did say AI-specific training will be more important in five years. On that, recruiters rated current graduates as only somewhat prepared or less to work with AI tools and said business schools are not doing a good job of teaching AI skills. Bottom line, according to the survey, what most companies want when it comes to AI skills is for candidates to be able to automate routine work That the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects Get started at ChatGPT.com today by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. This is Alexis Christophorus for Bloomberg Surveillance. AI is everywhere. Outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. The campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning, those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready-to-go AI teammates pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver. And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get. With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com. This coffee shop? Running smooth. [45:00] Thanks to Genius, from Global Payments, Instant Transactions, Effortless Inventory, and Synchronized Operations. Big League Reliability, for any business, that's genius. You know, something I realized, the Chinese currency, the highest denomination out there is 100 RMB, so only about $15. Also, every one of their bills has the exact same design, basically. It's the Mao photo, which I think is kind of interesting. you look around, it seems like they usually switch it up, etc. One thing I'm curious about, was crypto ever an important part of this story? I remember back then people were like, oh, it's going to be used for money laundering and stuff. And I thought that the crypto people made a good point. It's like, look at the banks and the cash you're producing. That's where most of the action is happening. Obviously, crypto isn't really like what it was, at least a few years ago, etc. But during that period, did it ever really move the dial as a vehicle? I mean crypto is huge for money laundering Specifically there are many cryptos It not just one thing Specifically we really talking about stable coins when we talk about crypto being big in money laundering I was talking earlier about trade money laundering and how essentially you can move value via moving stuff whether that Caterpillar earth equipment or handbags or drugs or whatever around the world And you move value in that shape like the Medici used to Crypto allows you to do that instantaneously So the really entrepreneurial money laundering gangs now tend to, and this is the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians do this too. They combine cash and crypto. So cash works at a street level and then you collect the cash and you exchange it for crypto and then the crypto is useful for moving it your wealth around the world for buying product from columbia or elsewhere so so the two are not exclusive in fact they supercharge each other criminals have always liked to you to stack different techniques on top of each other and so yeah cash is remains the most useful criminal tool at a street level but it's bulky it's not secure it's kind of annoying and smelly. It's annoying to count and so on. So if you can get away from using that as quickly as possible in order to move it around the world, that's where crypto comes in and is super useful. The Russians have been created their own cryptocurrency, A7, A5, although it's in a little bit of trouble at the moment, essentially as a way of allowing themselves to do this outside of the Western controlled stable coins But there are other Western controlled stable coins are available which I sure you have spoken about on the podcast In fact I know you have You know you mentioned earlier this idea that if the US got rid of bills then maybe everyone would just start using 200 euro bills or something like that. I'm curious in your discussions, you must have had some with money launderers or people who investigate money laundering. Do you hear a lot about, I'm trying to think what to say, fraudsters thinking about the actual like value of the currency or making currency heading decisions so like i don't want dollars because i think the dollar is going to go down i'm going to move into euros instead or is it just purely about the use case and some broader utilitarian diversification kind of thing i would love that if if there was i mean i i used to i used to live in russia and it's how i got into writing about financial crime was was living in russia i mean good thing about working in Russia as a journalist is you don't really need to look out financial crime, it tends to come and find you. And it was that there was a really deep awareness of the relative strengths of the euro and the dollar. And this was a time when the euro was looking very strong. And so there was a movement towards euros by ordinary Russians but you can get away from the fact that the dollar is just much more liquid a market It much more widely accepted And it was interesting it actually used to get different exchange rates for different kinds of dollars. When I first lived in Russia, I was paid in cash dollars, and I would always try and be paid in $100 bills because I knew I could get more rubles for $100 bill than I could for a 20, because there's that demand for hundreds. So no, I mean, the utility of dollars was more about the universal application of them, the fact they're accepted everywhere. And because, as you say, there is a 200 euro banknote, you can move twice the value in the same space with euros as you can with dollars. But because the dollar has got this kind of first mover advantage and it's globally accepted, the dollar remains the lingua franca of global criminality, the $100 bill, just because it is a much deeper, more liquid market, which has an interesting, obviously an interesting parallel to the role of the dollar as a global currency in the licit economy, which is that it has all of the instruments built up around it. Everyone trusts it, everyone knows it. And it is very difficult to dislodge that once it's been established. Yeah, just a last question for me. You mentioned the rise of some of these acts in the 70s and 80s to clamp down on money laundering, etc. [50:00] Political climate change. What was the political climate then such that there was an inspiration to really try to move on this? And would you just say we're in an environment today where there is just it's just not most people, most countries don't care very much and they have other things to worry about. And there isn't really the appetite to do another push, even if the reporting says there's quite a bit of it out there. I'm really glad you asked that because it gives me the opportunity to bring up my personal anti-money laundering hero who's a guy called Wright Patman who was a congressman from northeastern Texas who represented Texarkana in the area around there from the 1928 up to 1974 he was one of those imperfect but amazing southern democrats he was by southern democrat standards a really good guy but not necessarily a really good guy by everyone's standards today But he did have a very healthy distrust of monopoly power, financial institutions, which grew out of this sort of what was called the populist movement in Texas and the South and the Midwest in the late 19th century. And he really, as chair of the House Banking Committee in the 1960s, he pushed through some really interesting committee hearings and innovations And so the anti laundering legislation which is called the Bank Secrecy Act even though that not its proper name grew out of his personal kind of obsession with the wrong doing of the financial institutions. And because of the kind of way that Congress was very hierarchical back then, what the Banking Committee did, then Congress tended to go along with. He had a huge amount of personal power and prestige that allowed him to do that. And I'm not sure that that would be replicatable today. The role that he played, though, I think in a way is sort of in some ways you could see similarities with say the role that Elizabeth Warren played with consumer finance after the great financial crisis he managed to push through some changes and spearhead that so there was an opportunity back then with the growth of offshore finance in the 1960s and he took that opportunity to bring the bank secrecy act on onto the books so it is difficult to see who would fill the position that he filled now I mean that kind of politician is isn't really present but who knows things move fast and I personally would like to see politicians engaging with the minutiae of money laundering in the same way that he did and trying not to just as it were punt responsibility onto the banks and say that they just need to produce another hundred thousand suspicious transaction reports and instead say well actually what does money laundering really look like how do we tackle money laundering using crypto how do we tackle money laundering using handbags or earth moving equipment What is actually going on What really driving this Because we have a status quo that is incredibly expensive very intrusive We haven't talked about debanking, but that is a serious issue, both in politics, but I think more broadly, globally, that affects hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Muslims, but others too. There's a really grotesque side effect of anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing. restrictions. It's very expensive and it really doesn't work. So we're putting a lot of expense on financial institutions, and therefore on ourselves, and not really inconveniencing criminals to any meaningful extent. And one of the reasons why we're not inconveniencing them is because while governments are putting these very expensive regulations onto financial institutions, they are simultaneously printing essentially limitless quantities of banknotes that are allowing criminals to evade those same restrictions by just using cash. So it is an incredibly frustrating situation to look at. And to be honest, it just makes me furious most of the time. How would you actually change the incentive structure for banks? I'm thinking of like some poor compliance officer sitting in a basement somewhere and he filing thousands of suspicious activity reports knowing that they probably going to go into like some black hole that no one is ever going to read And at the same time it's not like the bank is getting rewarded for filing all of those. It's all downside, right? It's if you miss something and you get caught, then you're in trouble. So it feels like something could be improved on that side of things. The original idea with suspicious activity reports, which grew out of the creation of the Financial Action Task Force at the Paris G7 in 1989, the original idea would they would be a source of real time intelligence for law enforcement agencies, that they would receive these reports that would allow them to essentially see money laundering as it was happening. And for that to work, you need to have enough people to read the reports. You need to have essentially effective software systems that can take in the reports and kind of triage them to the places where they need to go. And that's what we don't have, that there has been this demand on financial institutions to hire tens of thousands of compliance officers who sit there bashing out reports for false negatives endlessly or false positives. And it's just incredibly laborious, bureaucratic and tiresome work. But at the same time, most countries don't actually, no countries really, resource their law enforcement agencies sufficiently to actually read the results. [55:00] reports that are being produced. So you have, like you say, a huge number of reports that are just going into essentially a black hole where they sit there and maybe they'll be looked at in the future and maybe they won't. And the downside of getting it wrong for a financial institution is a billion dollar, billion dollar plus fine. And the plus side of getting it right is kind of non-existent. So in terms of changing the incentives, it would be far better to have fewer suspicious activity reports that were actually being read. And then you could have a system where financial criminals were actually being prosecuted, and you would get a sort of a kind of feedback loop that that would then restrict the ability of their financial criminals to move their money. Because the whole idea of an anti-money laundering system is to try and take the profit out of financial crime or any acquisitive crime. That's what they're trying to do, is to make it expensive to launder money. That's what we're failing to do at the moment. So anything that can take away criminals' money and essentially take away their ability to move it so easily around the world, that would essentially be the purpose. And that is supposedly the purpose of the system that we have. Instead we have a system that piles a huge amount of paperwork on financial institutions and a huge amount of expense and occasionally fines them for their trouble but doesn really do anything to stop financial crime And that kind of as we say in Britain ass backwards All right I think that a good place to end it Oliver Bullough thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm living for now. Thank you, Oliver. That was great. so joe that was a fun conversation yeah i love reading about the intricacies of all these details and the complexity and a lot of creativity and crime extraordinary amount of creativity and it's like okay you come up with one idea where you can sort of it's like they found a free money glitch in the tax system where you import something have one transaction then claim the refund etc And then it's like finding these ways to do it across thousands and thousands of companies or fake companies, whatever it is. It's always very impressive to me. With carousel fraud, though, I keep thinking like, OK, sure, it makes you rich, right? Yeah. But your job is basically filing a bunch of paperwork and incorporating a bunch of shell companies which sounds really really boring It makes you rich but it provides you no meaning in life Yeah I mean I think like why not just start a business right Do something interesting Don't just make money by like creating shell companies. I don't know. I think people can find ways to enjoy themselves with just lots and lots of free money. You know, it's interesting. I've thought about this before when he was talking about the way criminals, as he called it, stack cash and crypto. And something I've thought about, and I think there's a lot is actually sort of like common even when he described a sort of like classically medici style banking system or whatever how many transactions that we think of as like being somewhat bilateral are actually like very multi-step so let's say you wanted to sell me a painting and i was like oh i'll pay it for you in bitcoin or like i don't really see that happening but it's like i want to i would have to like that would be three transactions because I would be purchasing Bitcoin from some entity. One Bitcoin exchange would then move it to your wallet. And then presumably you don't want to hold a lot of Bitcoin. So then you sell the Bitcoin for cash. So what looks like, oh, I'm going to pay you in Bitcoin is really three distinct movements. And I think that a lot of these things that he describes how can you deposit money in Rome and then withdraw it as soon as you get there in London Is this nature of the fact that a lot of times what looks like a transaction is really like this big multi transaction that can sort of be decomposed and rearranged like Lego blocks in multiple ways Yeah, which means there are all these little like vulnerabilities and steps that you can end up exploiting. Well, also on the crypto thing, it was interesting to hear that money laundering is predominantly about stable coins. Yeah, I was surprised. And that kind of gets back to the seniorage point, which is if you think of stable coins as something that nowadays finances U.S. government debt because a lot of the money goes into U.S. Treasuries, then you're back to this idea that, well, maybe people aren't particularly incentivized to crack down on what's essentially an interest-free – well, not in the case of Treasury, but a loan to the U.S. government. It's also interesting just generally that whenever you're talking about money laundering or crime, you use a metric that is very rarely ever discussed in economics, which is dollar value per unit of spatial volume. I guess that's true. That is a rare metric. But that's what we're talking about. Why is a Rolex a useful vehicle? It's because a high dollar value at a small spatial volume. And so what is the $200 bill or $100 bill on a Rolex? [60:00] things have in common. The opposite of it would be like, I don't know, a giant couch or something like that. It's probably like a pretty inefficient way to do it. There's a business opportunity for someone to create like lots of tiny, tiny, really valuable things, which I think gets us back to the beginning of money itself. It gets us back to the very beginning, jewels and all that stuff. Yeah, exactly. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dash O'Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots or the Diggly newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk about financial crime, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. Thank you healthcare doesn always work great If you ever waited on a refill or couldn schedule an appointment, you get it. That's the kind of stuff Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else. So healthcare is connected, not complicated. What's that look like? Cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person how you need it. Optum is helping make health care work as one for everyone. Learn more at business.optum.com. As a restaurant genius, I know the experience starts long before the food hits the table. 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