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If you look carefully, there's no evidence it's used for "criminal activities". In fact the article says there is only "growing concern" that they may be being

If you look carefully, there's no evidence it's used for "criminal activities". In fact the article says there is only "growing concern" that they may be being used for criminal activities. Where is the evidence? They just know its not moving through the system, so there for it must be criminals. A large portion of this I see as people moving their transactions outside of the banking system. The main reasons are a loss in faith is the financial system (especially in Europe). The banking system is very expensive, and very shaky. Just look at Deutsche Bank at the moment. And the Europeans all remember the situation that unfolded near them in Cyprus. Over time there will be more and more of the general economic transactions happening outside of the banking sector as the banking sector seeks to extract more wealth to pay off their bad debts and improve their solvency with haircuts, negative interest rates, bank holidays, bail ins, bail outs or capital controls. It's an extremely dangerous option to try, though, as it could lead to people losing faith with the system even more and shows how desperate they are. Things might be worse behind the scenes than they look on the surface.

tim333 11y ago
As an investor in Spain I've seen a lot of it used for not very legal activities. They used to have something called 'B money' on probably most property sales where you paid one amount say 170,000 euro officially and maybe 20,000 in cash B money so as to avoid the government stamp duty on the sale price. It was kind of tolerated and legally a bit grey. It would be more hassle to do if you had to count out 200 bank notes rather than 20. There also used to be a lot of property bought for cash with drug money which was of course illegal but went on a fair bit.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  There's "illegal" and then there's "shady" We see a lot of that in the states. You'll buy a car for $1500. Both of you call the "official" price $500. The seller pays less sales tax. You pay less property tax. Yes, illegal. But drug-running it's not. It's one thing to want to make things tough on drug dealers or terrorists. It's something else entirely to want to be able to observe and control every instance of money moving through the economy. We have to ask ourselves what the real goal is here. Or maybe a better question is: where are we going to end up? I know in the states we've seen a lot of drastic action around organized crime, mobs, and drugs. We had the RICO statute, then various laws around money movement. All passed because of severe and dangerous threats. But now? All of that heavy firepower we passed to prevent severe threats is applied to the average citizen. The effects are not pleasant to observe.

tim333 11y ago

As an investor in Spain I've seen a lot of it used for not very legal activities. They used to have something called 'B money' on probably most property sales where you paid one amount say 170,000 euro officially and maybe 20,000 in cash B money so as to avoid the government stamp duty on the sale price. It was kind of tolerated and legally a bit grey. It would be more hassle to do if you had to count out 200 bank notes rather than 20. There also used to be a lot of property bought for cash with drug money which was of course illegal but went on a fair bit.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
There's "illegal" and then there's "shady" We see a lot of that in the states. You'll buy a car for $1500. Both of you call the "official" price $500. The seller pays less sales tax. You pay less property tax. Yes, illegal. But drug-running it's not. It's one thing to want to make things tough on drug dealers or terrorists. It's something else entirely to want to be able to observe and control every instance of money moving through the economy. We have to ask ourselves what the real goal is here. Or maybe a better question is: where are we going to end up? I know in the states we've seen a lot of drastic action around organized crime, mobs, and drugs. We had the RICO statute, then various laws around money movement. All passed because of severe and dangerous threats. But now? All of that heavy firepower we passed to prevent severe threats is applied to the average citizen. The effects are not pleasant to observe.