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Comment by MrDunham | Hacker News Reader

I believe something similar was a major reason that a whole FIFA scandal was able to be taken down by US prosecutors.

Despite many people never setting foot in the US a lot of them use the US banking system or some of the piping that is predominantly US-based to move money around…

Meaning that the US can get involved.

From what I can tell it's extremely difficult to do business without having anything you do touch something based in the US. IE if you do business nearly anywhere, Uncle Sam can (almost certainly) prosecute

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Which is why, for better or worse, there are increasing pushes to break the dollar of being the world reserve currency. Time will tell if that happens. Any non-aligned country looks at what happened to Russia and Iran and wants to avoid that risk.

> From what I can tell it's extremely difficult to do business without having anything you do touch something based in the US. IE if you do business nearly anywhere, Uncle Sam can (almost certainly) prosecute

If you're doing business in any way that touches people from the US (which certainly FIFA does, one way or another), then it's hard.

But for the rest of us, it's not really that hard. Everything the US has, there is a alternative for that hasn't anything to do with the US, from banking to hosting to productivity tools.

Banking was the interesting one — the FIFA execs moved money and most bank wires (or ACH... I forget) end up going through the U.S. in one way or another if they're international.

All US wire transfers go through a US custodian bank, so if you're sending USD, it's making a trip through the records of (generally) Wells Fargo. And then, bam, you're under US jurisdiction.

Most bank wires/ACH using USD I can belive, but you can buy/sell/trade/transfer in other currencies, which in fact, lots of parts outside of the US constantly does :) In fact, the second largest market in the world trades mostly in EUR.

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