fogforthought93

What would the short-term benefit of this be for the government?

This reads like a madlib, it can't be serious. Who's embezzling money here?

No, this is not new. This is one of the oldest games there is, so it's more like grooming young lawyers/bankers to step into a role, a type, that's existed for hundreds of years. You have a pipeline of strivers to choose from, you have ultimate leverage over them. You force their hand.

No, it's far too risky and stochastic to rely on overheard bar convos for this kind of thing. To do this kind of large-scale fraud you need to be built into the system, you need reliable methods, backstops, entire plans for fall guys and controlled demolition of your schemes.

Ask yourself what certainties you, yourself, would want if you decided to use your job to conduct significant fraud. Then imagine you could get all of them because you're an insider to the system, you can write the laws, pay off the right officials, blackmail the lowly functionaries, etc.

It's not a new business opportunity—HSBC was founded to finance the Opium Wars in China! They know how to do this. The real question is why let us see, why let something like this become public news. As always, the answer can be found by starting with the question, Who benefits? and then following the money from there.

I'm not actually expecting a source—it was a polite way of saying that person has no idea what they're talking about.

Your description is in line with what I've read—there's hardly a smoking gun, scruples are almost totally absent, this is very serious business.

The risk is spread throughout the entire milieu of bankers, central bankers, cartel heads, cartel lawyers, etc. A similar model to the revolving door in DC. Capitalism itself tends toward cartelization, which is what allows the power elite to move freely about in a mutually assured destruction kind of way. If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty and we're in a pact to maintain that.

Idk where you got that figure for the drug economy but $360B per year is on the low-end and likely outdated.

Going off a UN report from the 90s, the illicit drug trade is similar to international trade in oil and gas—that's the order we're talking about. Remember this is a commodity, so it's a bit misleading to compare it the flow of money in foreign exchange markets.

UNDCP Technical Series Number 6:ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF DRUG ABUSE AND ILLICIT TRAFFICKING.

Which one? Back up what you say. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

I'm surprised that you'd bring up BCCI in this instance, an institution absolutely steeped in intelligence spookery. Refer to The Outlaw Bank by Jonathan Beaty.

HSBC was founded to finance the Opium wars in China in the 19th century. Let's be adults here, the world's biggest banks aren't letting drug trade profits, the world's most lucrative trade, simply fall to small fries. They own it.

Do you have a source for the claim that drug cartels "try all the banks to see which ones they can launder money through"?

I don't believe that's how it works at all. If you read, for example Drug Cartels Do Not Exist by Oswaldo Zavala, you'll see that this money is fundamental to how global finance operates. Drug money provided the necessary liquidity to keep the world finance system from crashing in '08. It's the main event, not a sideshow.

All kinds of source I'm sure—for example, the CIA has financed all sorts of black operations with drug trafficking since at least WWII. Now, that money would not be used to hire the rank and file, but it does relieve pressure on the budget.

Ransomware attacks come to mind. It wouldn't be hard to subcontract that out and keep even the hackers themselves from knowing who they're working for.

This style is ubiquitous—Terry Richardson, etc.