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Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America
- api 8y agoHidden in this article is perhaps an explanation for the monstrous hyperinflation of house prices that has occurred since the early 2000s. (The housing bubble corrected in 2008 but has since at least partly re-inflated, so it never really ended.) What is that you might ask? The PATRIOT act's KYC/AML regulations didn't apply to real estate! As a result loads of dodgy money flooded into real estate. Most of the direct money laundering activity was at the high end but I'm sure it affected the whole market. It also probably helped inspire the creation of those collateralized bundles of real estate debt that banks marketed so aggressively in the 'oughts and that had the follow-on effect of causing a market-wide housing bubble. It was a way for banks to indirectly use real estate to receive dodgy money and skirt AML requirements. This is important because real estate hyperinflation is one of the things destroying the middle class. Perhaps closing the KYC/AML loophole around real estate would go a long way toward fixing the problem. I wonder if this might be an even easier (and federal level) thing to accomplish than local and regional YIMBY activism, though the latter is obviously also important in some metro areas. I also think this kind of dodgy money largely explains the cryptocurrency bubble and why cryptocurrency continues to float at absurd valuations in spite of declining interest and increasing skepticism from the greater tech and user community. A lot of people think it's fraud on the part of things like Bitfinex/Tether, but I wonder if the money isn't largely real. It's just dodgy and dirty money.