Everybody Loves Our Dollars - How Money Laundering Won

You wouldn't expect that some of the Chinese tourists you saw buying luxury handbags in bulk in Bicester Village on Saturday afternoon were merely cogs in the wheel of global money laundering. One might think they are just shopaholics who love luxury brands and feel extremely happy in a picturesque shopping complex in Oxfordshire. However, as Oliver Bullough writes in his meticulously researched book about the world's failure to crack down on the global money laundering network, many of these shoppers and their bags represent a key link in a chain linking Chinese and European criminals. Criminals in China hand cash over to a middleman, who then packages it and delivers it to students traveling to the UK to study. Students are required to purchase handbags and send them to China. “Handbags flow from Europe to China, while drugs or other illicit goods flow from China, often to South America,” Buloff explains. “Criminals there then ship the drugs to Europe, completing the money transfer circuit.” It is believed that between two and 5 percent of global GDP is laundered money: it is “washed” through the financial system until its criminal origins disappear without a trace. Banks and governments seem to have no clue when it comes to addressing it properly. The book's title, "Everybody Loves Our Dollars," is a quote from an anonymous person in the U.S. Treasury Department, when an economist points out that the United States' continued production of $100 bills is actively helping criminals, terrorists, and tax evaders make the world poorer and less safe. "But why would the United States want to stop selling something so popular? Everyone loves our dollars," the Treasury official asked. Buloff visits a money-printing facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and sees first-hand the massive production: billions of bills rolling off printing presses every year—and this in a world where hardly any of us pay for anything in cash anymore.