Criminal Finance

Like it or not, money launderers are major players in the world’s economy. Their strategies constrain national economic policies and undermine financial institutions. With the advent of secure transfer technologies, and with the help of modern financial theories of derivatives and leverage, money laundering has become a significant structural component in contemporary geopolitics. This analysis focuses on control: how the problem is handled by legislation and regulatory and law enforcement agencies (particularly in the US and the EU), what the daunting challenges are that must be faced, what more can be attempted. In the course of developing in-depth consideration of the numerous intertwining issues that arise, the author uncovers a wealth of precise detail about what we know and what we can reasonably surmise about patterns of money laundering activity.
Relevant matters covered include: the internal measuring and monitoring systems used by financial institutions; methodologies in use or in development to measure the extent of money laundering; the role of money laundering in the “informal economy”; the global rise of new criminal organizations; conflicts of criminal legislation and civil law; the relation of money laundering to capital flight; degrees of moral ambiguity and appropriately tailored control strategies; the role of offshore financial centres (OFCs); the use of derivatives in the money laundering process; obstacles to the monitoring of wire transfer activity in real time; and the “ethical indeterminacy” of white-collar crime. As a cross-disciplinary analysis of money laundering – fully recognizing the activity’s economic, political, and juridical dimensions – this book identifies an array of criteria that may be used to develop and implement effective control strategies.