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Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering
Originally developed to reduce drug trafficking, national and international efforts to reduce money laundering have broadened over the years to address other crimes, and most recently, terrorism. These efforts now constitute a formidable regime applied to financial institutions and transactions throughout much of the world. Yet few assessments of either the achievements or consequences of this regime have been made. Reuter and Truman (1) explore what is know about the scale and characteristics of money laundering, (2) describe the current anti-money laundering regime, (3) develop a framework for assessing the effectiveness of the regime, and (4) use that framework to assess how well the current system works and make proposals for its improvement.
248 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2004
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February 28, 2009
How much money is laundered every year? Nobody knows. But because this is an important piece in understanding money laundering, the author dedicated an entire chapter to attempt to answer the question. And since this is a text book, this whole argument was exceedingly dull and I found myself rereading many sentences. However, this part was amusing and I actually laughed (which I was not expecting to do while reading this book):
They started with estimates of the number of acts of prostitution and the number that a full-time prostitute would commit in the course of a year. This calculation resulted in an estimate of full-time-equivalent prostitutes of 80,000 to 500,000. Add in considerable uncertainty about the annual earnings of a prostitute, and the result is an estimate of income that spans approximately an order of magnitude.
When you put it that way, yeah, you realize that figuring out how many whores are working a particular corner and the number of tricks each whore takes in a given year and how much they’re charging for whatever illicit act is not the issue. The issue is the illicit act itself and the importance there should be of putting a stop to it.
Besides the bit about the whores, the most exciting part about reading this book for me was entering the request for an inter library loan at my local St. Paul suburb library and several days later when it came in and realizing my local library had borrowed it from the ‘brar at my alma mater: Gustavus Adolphus College in the wee bitty hamlet of St. Peter, Minnesota. For a private college that only averages 2,500 students (or did average—I’m not sure if their attendance has grown since I graduated), I’m wildly amused that a book about money laundering (my profession: I work in surveillance and investigation) was found in the library at my old college (even though I only ever took one Economics class during my four years in attendance and barely squeaked by with a C). However, even though the book has been on the shelf since 2004, I appear to have been the first person to read this little gem. It smells brand new and the pages were crisp and rigid when I opened the book for the first time.
Reading this book was excruciatingly dull and yet the information inside was interesting (if you’re into money laundering) and I think the authors approached the data logically and presented the results in a manner that made sense. My only major critique of a book like this is the same thing that would apply to any text book—it will become outdated very quickly. The AML (anti money laundering) regime has already changed so much since this book was published in 2004 and there are already a number of new regulations and new areas of growth that were not covered in this book.
They started with estimates of the number of acts of prostitution and the number that a full-time prostitute would commit in the course of a year. This calculation resulted in an estimate of full-time-equivalent prostitutes of 80,000 to 500,000. Add in considerable uncertainty about the annual earnings of a prostitute, and the result is an estimate of income that spans approximately an order of magnitude.
When you put it that way, yeah, you realize that figuring out how many whores are working a particular corner and the number of tricks each whore takes in a given year and how much they’re charging for whatever illicit act is not the issue. The issue is the illicit act itself and the importance there should be of putting a stop to it.
Besides the bit about the whores, the most exciting part about reading this book for me was entering the request for an inter library loan at my local St. Paul suburb library and several days later when it came in and realizing my local library had borrowed it from the ‘brar at my alma mater: Gustavus Adolphus College in the wee bitty hamlet of St. Peter, Minnesota. For a private college that only averages 2,500 students (or did average—I’m not sure if their attendance has grown since I graduated), I’m wildly amused that a book about money laundering (my profession: I work in surveillance and investigation) was found in the library at my old college (even though I only ever took one Economics class during my four years in attendance and barely squeaked by with a C). However, even though the book has been on the shelf since 2004, I appear to have been the first person to read this little gem. It smells brand new and the pages were crisp and rigid when I opened the book for the first time.
Reading this book was excruciatingly dull and yet the information inside was interesting (if you’re into money laundering) and I think the authors approached the data logically and presented the results in a manner that made sense. My only major critique of a book like this is the same thing that would apply to any text book—it will become outdated very quickly. The AML (anti money laundering) regime has already changed so much since this book was published in 2004 and there are already a number of new regulations and new areas of growth that were not covered in this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review