[logicchains]

You do realise that the creation of the crime of "money laundering" and government attempts to crack down on it have been completely and utterly ineffective, with the illicit drug market being larger than ever (and money laundering laws failing completely to stop the creation of terrorist groups like Isis)? What they have achieved is facilitating unpredecented violation of citizens' financial privacy and massively inconveniencing small businesses, while having zero impact on the ability of the elites to engage in corruption.

[paulgb]

It will never be possible to completely stem the flow of profits from crime to clean money, or from clean money to terrorist groups. But I think the best metric of how well the efforts are working is to listen to the market and look at how much it costs to launder money. IIRC the book Lying for Money by Dan Davies had the figure as high as 50%, which is a pretty darn high transaction cost; if AML efforts didn’t work nobody would be paying it.