Why Money Launderers Love $100 Bills

0:00Game Insight on the innovators, disruptors, and tech-driven trends shaping today's complex economy. I'm Carol Masser. And I'm Tim Stenevek. Wrap up your workday with the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. We bring you deeper dives into the story shaping your world from the evolution of AI to the shifting priorities of global business. Plus, Silicon Valley power players and the latest tech trends. Catch up on the conversations you missed during the day. Subscribe to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Hello, Odd Lodz listeners. I'm Joe Wazenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. We're the hosts of the Odd Lodz 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 LA, we're going to be recording a live show, some live recordings at the Vermont Theatre in Hollywood on September 17th. We have some really exciting guests lined up.

1:02Have some really great conversations planned. So go ahead and get your tickets. You can find those over at Bloomberg.com forward slash Odd Lodz or click the link below in the show notes and come and say hi when you're there. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lodz podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wazenthal. Joe, everything I know about Cash came from that tour we took of the Chicago Feds Cash facilities with the, it's President Austin Guzmi. That was really fun. I'm trying to think. What do you remember? I remember just seeing lots and lots of cash. I remember appreciating the smell of the cash. It has a very idiosyncratic smell.

2:03I 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. But they're shades. Yeah. Absolutely. 50 shades of green. And then one thing that I remember is Austin actually telling us that 85% of the $2.4 trillion in circulation happens to be $100 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. We 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 it's 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 going. And then quite a bit of that cash in circulation isn't relatively high denomination bills that are even used less than say the fives of the 20.

3:06Yeah. I don't know about you, but I do not walk around with a lot of $100 bills in my pocket. No. Many there. On the rare occasions when I do go to a cash machine, I always choose 20. So even five and tens, right? Like, 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? Because I could 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 liked to 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. But maybe that's sort of a clue about the types of activities that might lend themselves to high denomination individual bills.

4:09Yeah. So this episode is perhaps poker adjacent. We're going to be talking about money laundering, which we've never done in episodes 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 don't believe some of the numbers. But when you figure out it's like, okay, 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 various sort of rigid capital controls. Trying to be an obvious example. You could 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's do it. We do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Oliver. Below he is a journalist and author of everybody loves our dollars.

5:10So Oliver, thanks so much for coming on all thoughts. And thanks for having me on the show. I'm 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 a hundred trillion dollars, that means 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. You know, as we measure everything in data centers now. How many data centers can you build?

6:11Yeah, 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 Michelle Candesco, who was the head of the International Manitou Fund back in the late 90s, French and Central Banker. And he came up with this idea in the late 90s that it was between two and five percent

7:13of 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 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 it, 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 five percent is the same estimate that was given in the late 90s, which is, it's a kind of uncomfortable truth hidden in that estimate, which is that if the scale or the share of the global economy that is criminalist, 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 outmaneuver regulators and law enforcement agencies and governments' attempts to limit them by a sort of ceaseless entrepreneurial nature ever

8:16since it's 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, no, 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 to dismiss what banks say is 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. This is rather weirdly named Bank Secrecy Act was passed back in 1970 in the US and then

9:22it 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, came in islands or Panama and then so it's pretty important to have their corporation 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 estimates from Lexus and Exorcists that global compliance with AML legislation 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 will 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 issue and a lot of that money is being spent by banks who are expected to check transactions to use evermore elaborate AI-powered compliance software, which they are doing, they are attempting to do the

10:26job being asked of that. 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 laundress who are always at least one step ahead. So, obviously, we really want to get into the details of the creative ways that criminals and so forth move money across borders, 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. Same 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? And how much, you know, we see the headlines from time to time, a bank will get into really

11:27big 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. Yeah, whether that's Dan Scabang 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, you know, accused of going through regulated financial institutions, it's just an absolutely different league. What Dan Scabang was accused of moving from a borrowerly about $130 billion 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.

12:29It is essentially a way of moving value around the world, not in the form of money at all, in the form of stuff. If you are moving value out of China, it's far easier to do it in the form of essentially missing, voicing 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. 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 to estimate. I mean, there is an institution in Washington, the global financial integrity that estimates that that's about a trillion dollars a year is moved by 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.

13:29Yeah. 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 a fentanyl for farming equipment. Can you 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 then there 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 estimate, 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 is just by exporting stuff.

14:31What does America make particularly? Well, well, I mean, catapult attractors, John Deere tractors, that's useful every once 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 gray market of designer goods which flow out of Europe into China. In return, we receive criminal goods or drugs in return. So essentially anything that is being made well in one place, whether that's catapult attractors 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't 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.

15:32No 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 more than $10,000 in cash with the airport, but you could easily have one million dollar watch on your wrist. No one would think anything of that. Talked 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 how money is moved out of China. The popular ways to move money out of China at scale. You mentioned 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 or $50,000 per person per year. Now $50,000 might sound quite a lot to the average Chinese person, but to a wealthy Chinese person, that's not nearly enough.

16:32There is a constant demand from wealthy Chinese people outside China for money that they can't move in a formal way. There is a huge appetite, a huge demand for cash, for some form of money. Now, what they really need is a supply of money, which they can meet in coming in the opposite direction, and then brokers can put those two together. Fortunately, in the West, we have created that supply of money by making drugs illegal. There is a gigantic supply of cash, which is being generated in a legal way. The Chinese money laundering networks, which have become incredibly sophisticated in the last 15 years, last 10 years, all over the world, have created a business model of putting together this demand for cash that comes from wealthy Chinese people outside China. The supply of cash that comes from the cartels or other drugs gangs in Europe, it's often the Albanians or the Indrangator in Italy and in the US, obviously, it would be more than the Mexicans or the Colombians. They put these two together, the Chinese demand and the cartels supply. This is often called the Vancouver model, slightly unfairly, because it doesn't only happen

17:34in 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's 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. 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 it over to generate more gambling. So you end up with essentially a circular transaction where money would change hand in

18:34China between a criminal gang and a wealthy Chinese person. Money would change hands in Canada between a drug's 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. 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. It might be the movement of luxury goods from Europe, the UK or France to 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 a 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

19:36this 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 as this is pleasing is maybe not the word that I'm kind of a nerd. Intellectually satisfying. Intellectually satisfying. And 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 where well you could deposit money at a branch of their bank in Venice or Florence. And then you could collect that same money in in Brujor 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't moving bullion from Italy to Belgium or Italy to the UK for the same reason that ordinary people would 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 we're just hiding the movements of cash in the paperwork. And you know, in the years after World War II, some academics found there what they were

20:37called 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. And it's not either 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, A&L, anti-money laundering, CFT, counter-finance 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 CNLNs, it's a four letter acronym. You know that that's a big deal. Hi, I'm Barry Rittalts inviting you to join me for the

21:47Masters in Business Podcast. Every week we bring you conversations with the people who shake markets, investing, and business. I speak with CEOs, Nobel laureates, market innovators, and legendary investors. Whether you own stockspons, real estate commodities, even crypto, these are discussions you absolutely need to hear. Subscribe to the Masters in Business Podcast on Apple Spotify or anywhere you listen. There does seem to be something very traditionalist about 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 have 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 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's so complicated

22:50and so extraordinary that you think that if the criminals have designed it, if instead that they're decided to set themselves to solve in 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 value-added tax is designed in the European Union. Back then, the UK was in the European Union. 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 is a hat 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 around and around and that's why it's called Carousel for it. It went around like a merry-go-round. And it became, it started off as just this very simple transactions and then asked the tax authorities picked up on that. They became more and more complicated with different chains of shell companies going in

23:51all directions and incredibly complicated. But yeah, let you say what's really interesting about it. It's 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 Greece to Sweden. Can you just 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 off the odd loss. Now I know that it's really explained. It's awesome. But so it's called Carousel fraud or missing trader into community fraud, MTIC, which is a full 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

24:54in the UK, and then you don't pay VAT on that trade because you've imported it, right? So no taxes paid. You then sell it to 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 you, if the second company exports the good because they've exported it, they can claim from the treasury, they can claim the 20% back again, they can claim that 20% because they, that's what they get because they've exported the good. So essentially you export it, but without ever having paid it, paid it in the first place, you're essentially claiming that that that you never paid. So it's called missing trader into community fraud because the, the, 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 attacks that has never been paid, which has this amazing ability unlike all forms of, almost all other forms of organised crime that I know of. Essentially there is no limit to the amount of money that a criminal gang can make out

25:54of this. So there is no reason for criminal gangs to compete. They can, 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 be discovered by accident by mobile phone vendors in the 1990s, who then realised that there was this unbelievable golden goose that they could just keep milking if that's what you do with geese, keep egging for, for golden eggs consistently. And they kept going for absolutely ages. I mean, you know, some of them carousel fraudsters became on the British rich list of the richest people in the country because they made so much money out of it. But, but essentially that the floor it is at the, the fact that you can import something without paying that and then you can claim the back 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 fact that that 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

26:56who 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 a two shell companies, one selling it to another and then exports it. In reality, you're talking about thousands of shell companies moving, 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've 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. This is called the paradox of banknotes, what you described at the beginning.

27:57It was first identified formally by Andrew Bailey, now the governor of the Bank of England, that 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 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 demand is very low, for some reason supply is very, very high and getting higher all the time. Consistently, it almost everywhere the amount of cash in circulation is hitting record highs in the US. It's almost 2.5 trillion US dollars in circulation. I was hoping it would hit 2.5 trillion in time for the 250th anniversary because it would have had a nerdy appropriateness, but it didn't quite get there.

28:59But 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 the huge quantities of back notes are being printed and yet very few are being used. And there have been a number of proposals of 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 back notes 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 back notes 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, 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 there is clearly another reason for it.

30:03And central bank has 10 to now just fall back on saying that it's a store of value. There are two basic uses for money. Really, it's either a medium of exchange or it's a store of value. Those are the two options. And since it's not being used as a medium of exchange, then they said, 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, 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.

31:12At 65% maybe of dollar bank notes 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 still must be being used for something. And yet what is it? Well, essentially, we don't know. They never really, the central bank has certainly never really answered that question of where are all this astonishing quantity of bank notes at their printing. And it is a really interesting puzzle. I mean, if you imagine that this was not bank notes that we're talking about, but was VHS cassettes that Netflix has owned, 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 bank notes, 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, yeah, of course, central bank notes. Central banks make money by distributing dollars. But I don't actually know how it works.

32:13Well, 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. Seniorage means that which pertains to the senior 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's quite a lot of warlords in Anglo-Saxon 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 have 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 seniorage. 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.

33:13So the simple but wrong way of looking at this is that it's very cheap to print money. It costs about $0.9 to print $100 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 $0.9 to print. You can see that there's a 99.9%, 91% margin on producing them. That's a very profitable thing. It's your seniorage right there, the fact that you're making $99.91 every time you print $100 bill. So that's the simple but wrong way of looking at it. And central bankers will tell you this is wrong because actually $100 bill, if you take $100 bill out the bank, you're not actually buying that $100 bill because you can sell it back at any time for the same amount that you bought it for. So actually, it's 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 $2.5 trillion US dollars out there somewhere. That's an interest-free loan to the US government broadly understood of $2.5 trillion.

34:13Now, I think the US government debt outstanding government debt is something like $40, almost $40 trillion now. So $2.5 trillion 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. And if you had to pay interest on that extra $2.5 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 bear instruments that don't pay interest. So that's, as it were, the right but complicated way of looking at Sany Ridge. But either way that you look at it, Sany Ridge is a very profitable thing to have, which is why governments tend to like having a monopoly on the issuing of money, because it's essentially, either it's just straightforwardly profitable selling bits of paper or it's a very cheap way

35:17of 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 Sany Ridge 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, whatever, 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 Sany Ridge. We should do something about this. But essentially these are different bits of government and they don't necessarily talk to each other. There have been occasions in the

36:19past when governments have got rid of big bills to try and reduce criminality or terrorism. After the attacks on Paris in 2016, the Europeans announced that they weren't going to produce, they had 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. 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. That's the first hint. Singapore used to have a big bill as well, I think, a 10,000 euro bill, which they, it's a 10,000 dollar 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 dollar bill, and I wish it would, I don't think that there is anyone really who would be inconvenienced by the lack of 100 dollar bills except the bad guys. But is that easier for producing them? Well, the 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

37:22age 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's a 50 pound note or a thousand frank note or 200 euros or 100 dollar bill, that if one of them went out the game, it essentially wouldn't 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, it's 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 100 dollar bills are the favorite 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 challenges

38:26trying 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 an interest for this idea. He's really come up against the challenge of trying to get everyone in a room together to agree to it. Hi, I'm Carol Masser with a helpful tip to keep you plugged in throughout the market day. Subscribe to the Stock Movers Report from Bloomberg. These are short audio episodes, five minutes or less delivered right to your podcast feed. Stock Movers fills you in on the day's winners and losers on Wall Street and tells you about the news and data that's driving those gains and losses. Why spend all day watching tickers scroll across your screen? Subscribe to Stock Movers

39:26today, an Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen. You know, something I realized the Chinese currency, the highest denomination note there is 100 RMB. So only about $15. Also, every one of their bills is 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 like back then people like, I was just going to be used from 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 on a few years ago, etc. But during that period, was it ever did never really move the dial as a vehicle? I mean, crypto is huge for money laundering. Specifically, there are many cryptos, you know, it's not just one thing. Specifically, we're really talking about stable coins. When we talk about crypto being big in money laundering, I was talking earlier about trade-based

40:29money laundering and how essentially you can move value by moving stuff, whether that's caterpillar, earth moving equipment or handbags or drugs or whatever around the world. And you move value in that shape like the Medici's 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 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.

41:32The Russians have been created their own cryptocurrency A7A5, although it's in a little bit of trouble. At the moment, essentially, is a way of allowing themselves to do this outside of the the Western controlled stablecoins. But there are other Western control stablecoins are available, which I'm sure you have spoken about on the podcast in fact, I know you have. You know, and you mentioned earlier this idea that if the US got rid of $100 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 launders or people who investigate money laundering. Do you hear a lot about trying to think what to say fraudsters thinking about the actual 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 there was, I mean, I used to I used to live in Russia and it's how I got

42:36into writing about finance crime was living in Russia. I mean, good thing about working in Russia was a journalist, you don't really need to look out for an actual 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't get away from the fact that the dollar is just much more liquid a market. It's much more widely accepted. And it was interesting. It actually used to get some 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 dollar bills because I knew I could get more rubles for 100 dollar bill than I could for a 20 because there's that demand for for hundreds. So no, I mean, dollars were that 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 bank, though, you can move twice the value in the same space with euros as you

43:38can 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 dollar 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 Lissit 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. You just last question from me, you mentioned the rise of some of these acts in the 70s and 80s to clamp down on money laundering, etc. Has the political climate changed? 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.

44:44I'm really glad you asked that because it gives me the opportunity to bring up my personal anti-marital-ondering hero who is a guy called Wright Patman, who was a congressman from North East 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 Democrats standards a really good guy, but not necessarily a really good guy by everyone standards today. But he did have a very healthy distrust of monopoly power, financial institutions, which grew out of this, what was called the populist movement in Texas and the South and the Midwest in the late 19th century. And he really was just chair of the House Banking Committee in the 1960s. He pushed through some really interesting committee hearings and innovations. And so his the anti-marital-ondering legislation was called the Bank Seek Society Act, even though that's 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, if what the Banking

45:45Committee 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 replicable today. The role that he played though, I think 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 Seek Society Act onto the books. So it is difficult to see who would fill the position that he filled now. I mean, that kind of politician 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

46:46tackle money laundering using handbags or earth moving equipment? What is actually going on? What's 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, as 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 are putting a lot of expense on financial institutions when, therefore, on ourselves and not really inconvenience in criminals in to any meaningful extent. And one of the reasons why we're not inconvenience to 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 incredibly frustrating situation to look at. And to be

47:47honest, 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's filing thousands of suspicious activity reports, knowing that they're 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 be a sort 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 and you need to have essentially effective

48:47software systems that can take in the reports and kind of triage them to the people 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 know countries really resource their law enforcement agencies sufficiently to actually read the reports that are being produced. So you have, like you say, 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, 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

49:47being 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 equititive crime. That's what they're trying to do is to make it expensive to loan to 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 powers a huge amount of paperwork on financial institutions and a huge amount of expense and occasionally finds them for their trouble, but doesn't really do anything to stop financial crime. And that's kind of as we say in Britain, all backwards. All right, I think that's a good place to end it all over below. Thank you so much for coming on All Lots. Thanks for having me on the show. Thank you all for

50:48that 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 very always very impressive to me with carousel fraud. I keep thinking like, okay, 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. So you think the problem is like it makes you rich, but it provides you no meaning in life. Yeah,

51:49I 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 them. So 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, is he called it stack cash and crypto and something I've thought about. And I think there's a lot, there's 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 know, I see that happening, but it's like, I want to extend. Like that would be three transactions because it would be I would be purchasing Bitcoin from some entity. Yeah. The one Bitcoin exchange would then like 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,

52:50I'm going to pay you in Bitcoin is like really three 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 it looks like a transaction is really like this big multi-leg transaction that could 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 stablecoins. Yeah, I was surprised. Yeah. And that kind of gets back to the seniorage point, which is if you think of stablecoins as something that nowadays finances, US government debt because a lot of the money goes into US 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 alone to the US government. It's also interesting just generally that like whenever you're

53:53talking about money laundering or crime, you use a metric that is very rarely ever discussed in the economics, which is dollar value per unit of spatial volume, right? Because that is a rare metric. But that's what we're talking about. Like, it's like why is a Rolex a useful vehicle? It's because a high dollar value at a small spatial volume. And so like, what is the $200 bill or $100 bill on the Rolex and other things have in common, the opposite of get would be like, I don't know, a giant couch or something like that is 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 back to the very beginning jewels. All that stuff. Yeah, exactly. Shall we leave it there? Let's see if it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill. Why isn't all you can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashobinet, and Dashbot, Kel Brooks, Kel Brooks, and Kevin

54:56Luzano at Kevin Lloyd, Luzano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com, slash Odd Lots, or a bit digly newsletter in all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our discord discord.gg slash Odd Lots. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, 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 add free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm David Weston. Join me every week for the Wall Street

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