And the status quo where the banks take a bigger cut to pay for their big compliance departments and the government takes a bigger cut to pay for auditing those compliance departments is somehow better?
X-percent not in your pocket is X-percent not in your pocket no matter how you cut it. At least in the proposed "stop giving a crap" case nobody will be denied access to boring routine financial products because they have a 3rd cousin with the same name as a Turkish mob boss.
That is nothing compared to the costs of crime in high-crime/high-corruption societies. And looking at dollars alone doesn't paint a true picture. Criminal enterprises work through violence and add risk throughout the economy. E.g., if your business is doing well, a protection racket is not going to take 1% and call it a day. They'll take everything they think they can get. And if not, they break your leg. That serves as a strong disincentive to creating successful businesses.
Do the FDIC have disputes with the OCC? Probably. But unlike criminal gangs, they don't settle them with shooting wars in the streets.
Is it really though? How much was the US (or any other equally developed country) losing to crime and corruption prior to all this KYC/AML BS? Not that much. Letting a mobster have a bank account doesn't magically turn your country into Nigeria. If anything it makes your country better because the mobster doesn't have to store that value another way and then protect it (with violence). >Criminal enterprises work through violence and add risk throughout the economy
So like government but with less abstraction?
> But unlike criminal gangs, they don't settle them with shooting wars in the streets.
Only because they don't have to. Being an above the table enterprise they can just go to the government court system and get their (credible threat of) violence that way.
All this violence you're complaining about w.r.t. organized crime is just their (low buck, because due process and diffusion of responsibility sufficient to dissuade revenge are expensive) way of settling business disputes.
Man, for that brief shining window we really had perfection.
And crime has definitely gone up because of cryptocurrency. I'm not sure how much it has affected the more traditional sorts of crime, as I don't think it's much of a help in turning dirty cash into clean assets thanks difficulty of exchange and the ledger acting as "prosecution futures". But ransomware has grown massively thanks to cryptocurrency. And ransomware gangs have grown correspondingly in size and sophistication thanks to having all that money to spend.
The US mafia declined because of the rico act and the fact that there was less racism and better integration of italian americans. The current ethnic crime groups of today are different.
IMO AML is security theatre, much like the post 9/11 flying regulations making everyone's lives worse, especially if your name is Mohammed sending money to family back home in the home country.
Real Estate provides a much easier method to move millions.
