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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I am trying to be surprised to find criminal activity in Finance but I cannot work up the passion.

The UK happily lets in an estimated 90 billion a year of dirty money to be laundered in the City of London, and all we need do to stop it is enforce beneficial ownership registries.

The US holds non US transactions to a higher standard of proberity than onshore (foreign corrupt practises act)

I am still guided by two principles on this - that complete openness and transparency solves 80% of problems and rigorous competition solves the rest (my favourite phrase - a billionaire is an example of market failure)

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"a billionaire is an example of market failure" This is at least funny, but might have a lot of truth in it as well. I formulated something similar about the marching almost-monopolies like Apple and Facebook: they are a gigantic failure of competition.

The simple question is whether most billionaires have actually contributed $1B of effort in producing value. The answer is mostly no, that most of that value was extracted from other workers who were disproportionately less rewarded than people who were able to structurally secure more ownership than the value they conteibuted

My point is not some kind of value judgement on billionaires but that their wealth should have been competed out - there is not a cadre of multi millionaires who offered a billion went "no thanks i'm fine"

> of dirty money to be laundered in the City of London

Nonsense in more ways than one

How so?

Here's a publication from the UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Select Committee, dated 21 May 2018, "Moscow's Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK".

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmfa...

This is the first sentence to mention money laundering "The Government responded robustly to the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury in March 2018. But despite the strong rhetoric, President Putin and his allies have been able to continue “business as usual” by hiding and laundering their corrupt assets in London."

Section 3 is called "Closing the Laundromat".

Writing this comment served to remind me that the publications from the UK Parliament are generally of very high quality (certainly anything I've ever read).

Thank you - i need a better bookmark filing system than my head

Precisely how does that support the statement that this is something specific to London?

>I am trying to be surprised to find criminal activity in Finance but I cannot work up the passion.

I'll take greedy financiers ripping off other greedy financiers over the vast surveillance industry that Silicon Valley is currently building out. But everyone on these boards is innocent of that, of course.

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