YouSaid · the spoken record

Oliver Bullough

lines on the record: 42
first: 2026-02-01
most recent: 2026-02-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm sure they wouldn't mind. I'm sure they'd be, well, maybe they would. Anyway, that is a bridge we were cross when we come to.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“valuable of it and instructive as an example is that it wasn't just a problem that they left to the financial system to solve. The government tackled it and they tackled it with all of the tools they had available, diplomatic tools, law enforcement tools, legislative tools. They really went at it and they went at it hard and they solved the problem or they certainly managed to reduce it so small that it wasn't really a problem worth worrying about anymore. And that kind of effort scaled up imaginative, flexible, really well informed by intelligence. It's been so difficult for politicians to make the argument for doing that. It wouldn't be that expensive compared to what we're spending money on at the moment. And the rewards would be almost immeasurable in terms of the reduction crime that you could see.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I mean, I'm an optimist. There's no point in not being an optimist. As they say, if you're a pessimist, even when you win, you lose. So you have to keep hoping for the best. But it would require a degree of political commitment that I've never really seen in any country. But I do try in the book, I do. There is an example, I tell at the end of, you know, what it looks like to win against financial crime. There was a particular crime, I mean, it's still very widespread in the European Union, but which was tackled very successfully in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s called Carousel Fraud, which is a form of financial crime involving defrauding of the VAT system. The crime itself is quite complicated. I don't really need to go into it. But what was...”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invent a new way of moving money. They don't stop doing the old ones. They still do all the old ones, but then they do the new ones too, which means that the crime just expands because it has becomes ever easier to launder money. And so, yeah, crypto is a massive problem. It's a problem that I think most Western governments have really not managed to understand properly and to confront properly. There have been isolated efforts to treat with it as a sort of law enforcement thing, but really this needs to be dealt with at a much higher level. This is a strategic threat to what little progress we've made against for tackling money laundering in the last 30, 40 years, crypto threatens to destroy all of that. and to send us right back to the beginning.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, stable coins are an unbelievably useful tool. And to be honest, it is one of the really alarming things about the Trump administration is how willing they have been to embrace cryptocurrencies. It's been very profitable for members of several of the close family members of the Trump administration. And it's also been really damaging for the attempts to limit money laundering by rogue regimes, by terrorist groups, by scam artists and so on. I mean, we've seen, you know, the Iranian government, you know, they're now largely using stablecoins to move money around. The Russians are using them for sanctions evaders. The giant scam farms in Cambodia and Southeast Asia, again, it's crypto enabled. So yeah, it is a huge problem. But it's a huge problem added on top of all the other problems. Every time the criminals...”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, crypto isn't just one thing, right? There are lots of different kinds of crypto. Lots of kinds of crypto. They're just not really that useful for committing financial crime. They are kind of clunky to use, expensive to use, wildly volatile. I mean, Bitcoin is useful in some ways, but as a actual currency, it's useful for speculating, but as natural currency, it's not that useful. The form of crypto that I've become slightly obsessed by, it's called a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency, but which is pegged to a real life currency normally, but not always the US dollar. And these are a new and incredibly useful tool for money launderers, sanctions evaders, kleptocrats. I mean, everyone, everyone who wants to move money easily around the world outside of the scrutiny of such as there is the anti-money laundering system.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just to get that message, because we have been as a civilization supposedly fighting money laundering. Since the late 1980s, in the United States, for even longer since 1970. And yet, we have achieved almost nothing. And that's, it's a real indictment, to be honest, of shocking of a lack of scrutiny. Considering how important it is as a campaign to try and limit acquisitive crime. A few things are more important, to be honest. And yet, you know, we've just failed and failed again.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In an undetected way, then they wouldn't commit so many crimes. There wouldn't be so much fraud. There wouldn't be so much drug trafficking, people trafficking, kleptocracy, all of the crimes that are devastating really large amounts of the world that are driving quite a lot of our most important security challenges, whether that's the war in Ukraine or terrorism in Central Africa or the Middle East or whatever. So much of this is driven by just how simple it is to move dirty money around the place to hide it to legitimize it and to spend it. And if we could live up to its governments, if we could live up to our rhetoric about actually genuinely making it hard to launder this money, then so many of these problems would be, if not solved, then really significantly ameliorated. I really would, you know, would love if some influential people, if not read the book, then to watch this podcast.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, it's always easy to reach for the corruption card when trying to explain things. But I do believe in the idea that we should probably explain things more by incompetence than by corruption. I genuinely think that people don't know what's going on, that there is a limited amount of bandwidth in politics to deal with all the issues that are out there. And this is happening, whatever. If people want our banknotes, let them have our banknotes. I think that's the general basis of the topic. But, you know, the point I'm trying to make in the book, and the point I really, really want to get across is that money laundering isn't just a white-collar crime. It isn't just something that you can ignore and think of as being victimless. It is the support industry for the worst people in the world. If it wasn't so easy for criminals to legitimize the money that they've stolen to make it look clean so they can spend it.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a wonderfully Swiss story. The combination of extreme safety on the street and also the willingness to hand someone an envelope a thousand franc bills.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Profit. Essentially, every time you send one out the door. So at the same time, governments are loading these huge costs, 200 billion dollars worth of costs on the financial system to comply with anti-money laundering law, and then they're profiting massively but selling the most useful tool for evading those same laws. So, I mean, to say that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing is really understating how incoherent this system that we've created is.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't ordinary people who are using it. I mean, if you look at what's the most printed form of US currency, it's a $100 bill. Yeah, how often do you see $100 bill in the US? It's quite unusual. Where are they all going? It's very clear that this is being used essentially to a large extent by people to evade the system. Now, some of those people, yes, they are Muslims who are being excluded from the financial system and they are using it just in order to survive. But the vast majority of the people who are using this cash are clearly criminals, money launderers, who are essentially evading the checks being put in place by the banks at government's insistence. And it's particularly gross and hypocritical that the tool they're able to use to evade those checks is being produced by those same governments because producing cash is a very profitable thing for governments to do. Printing $100 bill costs about 10 cents. And yet, so that's a $99.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is a really amazing point. I'm really glad you brought it up because the sort of general idea about cash is that people aren't using it anymore. And that's true. If you look across the board, ordinary people use cash less and less and less in transactions. In the UK, in the most recent figures, fewer than 10% of transactions were done in cash, which is down from about 50% a decade ago. The UK is an unusually kind of sort of electronic money favored society, but still, I mean, that's true in other places too. The proportion is falling. And yet, if you look at the amount of cash being printed by central banks, by the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and so on, it's just going up and up and up all the time. It hits a record high, the amount of cash in circulation almost every month in the United States. The Eurozone just hit one last month. Where's the money going? Who is using all this cash?”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Farage has for decades, you know, and yet without any kind of uproar politically at all. And it really, I mean, it shows very crudely where power lies in society and the kind of people whose society actually cares about. There's this saying, the purpose of a system is what it does. You shouldn't listen to what people who run a system say they're doing, but you should instead look at what they are doing. And if you judge the anti-money laundering system on that basis, what does it actually do? Well, it generates a colossal amount of paperwork. It excludes very large numbers of vulnerable people from their financial system and it costs an absolute fortune and it achieves almost nothing. It is almost impossible for me to be negative enough about how badly it operates.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it was clearly distressing for Nigel Farage. And there also have been a few prominent crypto people in the US who have also had trouble getting financial services. And it's clearly distressing for them. But what's annoying about all of these incidents is they've essentially been able to claim that the debanking problem is something that affects just right-wing people, crypto people, people who are trying to do something a little bit edgy in the economy or who've got opinions that the Wokarati don't like. And yeah, don't get me wrong. I actually find it alarming that the financial system can exclude someone like Nigel Farage simply because they don't, well, they thought that his political views were a bit controversial. I think that was what it said in the reports that were released. And yet this has been going on to ordinary Muslims who don't have access to the kind of media friends that crypto people in Nigeria.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this scaled up is a problem all over the world where we see particularly charities with Muslim beneficiaries being really unfairly targeted, unfairly excluded from the financial system. And this is astonishingly counterproductive. The anti-terrorist financing system was intended to keep the West safe from our enemies, but instead you're essentially discriminating against Muslims in the kind of way that's going to really essentially disillusion people with the idea that the West is a center of the freedom that we're supposed to be a center of. And it is, I think, a really to the discredit of our political system that this has been going on now for what almost 25 years. And yet it's never really penetrated mainstream political thought at all. It really shows how excluded these communities are in a way that is”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lives quite near me in Wales who has the story I can't really go into here, but it's an incredible story. He has a family connection to Somalia because of what his father did in the Second World War. And, you know, so he was concerned about the Somalis who live in the UK losing touch with their ancestral traditions. And he created essentially on his farm a place for them to go to sort of hear about their ancestral traditions from their grandmothers and so on to really get out of the cities to experience rural life a bit. It's a lovely very small scale, but really lovely, very wholesome charity. And yet he faces scrutiny because he's being paid by Somalis, people with Muslim names. He faces scrutiny in his financial affairs all the time. And that's nothing to what the individual Somalis face. You know, they are essentially trying to gather money together to pay, to take their families camping. And yet they, as a result of gathering the money together, they lose their bank accounts or they get summoned in for questions.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's possible to do this, but it's still something that banks are required to do. So, what are they doing instead? Well, they look for proxies for terrorists. One group that they were told to look out for were charities raising money for certain communities, which in the context of 9-11 meant Muslims. So you end up with Muslim charities or charities intended for Muslim beneficiaries or to benefit Islamic countries being really unfairly singled out for scrutiny.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is where it genuinely gets really serious. It isn't just bureaucratic paperwork and sort of busy work which is being generated by this system, but it actually has really genuinely negative consequences for ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives, particularly after 9-11 when anti-terrorist financing or counter-terrorist financing was added to the anti-money laundering idea. And it's actually incredibly hard to see terrorist financing because unlike big money launderers, they're not moving huge amounts of money, at least you know the Sinala cartel is going to be moving a massive amount of money so you can look for big transactions. Terrorist groups aren't like that. They can do station atrocity for thousands of dollars. They don't need tens of millions. So it's incredibly difficult. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to see terrorists moving their money. And no one's ever shown.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredible quantities. I mean, hundreds of thousands of these reports, which then pile into law enforcement agencies that have no one to read them because there aren't enough people in the law enforcement agencies to look at them. So, I mean, it's an entirely, you know, it's a paper or report generating system which essentially exists to protect the financial institutions from being fined without really doing anything at all to stop money laundering.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, CYA that cover your ass. Basically, the entire system, and this is at the core of why our efforts to stop money laundering fail is that we've essentially deputized the policing of the financial system to banks and other financial institutions. And we tell them that they have to file reports to the authorities if they see something suspicious. Now, they don't really care. With the best will in the world, I mean, it'd be nice if they did, but they don't really care about stopping financial crime. What they really care about is not being fined. So they're going to over-report. They're going to make sure that anything that could vaguely be considered suspicious or even possibly suspicious. They're going to report to the authorities because then they've kicked the problem upstairs. And that's what is referred to by some of the more cynical law enforcement professionals as a CYA report. Cover your ass report. And they are generated.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another really big one. So I am, you know, if there is one acronym based lesson to take away from this book, it's that you don't really need to pay any attention if it's only a three-letter acronym. But if someone hits you with a full-letter acronym, that's when you need to really wake up.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I got, you know, the whole three-letter acronym thing begins with Wright Patman's Bank Secrecy Act or the BSA, as it's always called, which of course is all engaged with anti-money laundering or AML. These days it's also involved in counterterrorist financing or CTF. There are so many acronyms. It's absolutely insane. If you're reading these documents, there needs to be an entire glossary of what all the acronyms mean. But there's essentially one core principle in the anti-money laundering world, that three-letter acronyms are important. But if there's something genuinely important, it's a four-letter acronym. If there's a four-letter acronym, you know it's a big deal. So the financial action task force, the lead intergovernmental body for tackling money laundering, that's the FATF or the FATF, or the really big mechanism used by criminals to move value around the world outside the financial system, trade-based money laundering or TBML.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About $50 billion left over to do other things with. And that's the amount of money that we're spending on an entirely broken system. And I think that that is a problem that requires far greater scrutiny than it gets at the moment.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thousands, millions of people losing their bank accounts and so on. And yet it has essentially achieved nothing, the proportion of the world economy that remains of criminal origin is the same as it was when it was first estimated back in the 1990s. And that's the sort of problem I was trying to unpick in the book. Why is it if we're doing all this work spending all this money that we're achieving so little? And it is a massive amount of money that gets spent tackling or supposedly tackling money laundering every year. I mean, the cost of global compliance in the global financial services industry is something like, by the best estimate we have, just over 200 billion with a B, $200 billion. Is that a big number? Yes, it is. For that sum of money, you could, you know, according to the best guess of the United Nations, you could solve world hunger. You could provide clean water and sanitation to everyone on earth.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the, I mean, I think the most, in a way, I mean, sort of the origin of the book was for me was, you know, there is this, you know, estimate of how much money is laundered globally that was made in the 1990s by the then head of the International Monetary Fund, Michelle Candesu. And it wasn't a particularly scientific estimate, but it seems to have been in the right ballpark that between two and five percent of global GDP is of criminal origin. So that's how much money is being laundered. And that estimate is still used now. And as far as we can tell from efforts to refine it, it remains broadly speaking correct. So we've had this massive, very expensive global effort to stop money laundering that goes on year after year after year that's involved countries like the Marshall Islands and many others being blacklisted and excluded from the global financial system.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to do something about criminal finance, what you really need are some quite significant interventions in the way money moves around in Manhattan, Switzerland, London and other big financial centers. But no one in those countries actually really wants to do that because that would be intrusive, expensive, and kind of hard work So, yeah, criminals, it's.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made up of places like Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and so on, to punish each other. That's quite awkward. And difficult diplomatically. So they prefer to, instead of punishing each other, they prefer to victimize the kind of small countries that do small things. And the example that I chose to focus on, though I could have chosen lots of others, was the Marshall Islands, a place that's often associated with shell companies, but where the shell company registry and the shipping registry is entirely run, essentially out of the United States. It was the idea of the United States, in fact, set up with a grant from the United States. So you had this mad situation whereby the United States encouraged the Marshall Islands to do something, help them set it up, and essentially ran it out of Virginia. And then once they did it, they then punished them for doing so. And that's kind of in a nutshell, essentially what you see with a lot of the battle against money laundering.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think this is something that you can see in the work that you've done as well, Atusa, about small jurisdictions. They are often looking for new ways of making money and new ways of where to rent out their sovereignty, which is, I think, what you've been writing about. So often you can get a lawyer from the US or the UK or Switzerland who will go to a small jurisdiction and say, hey, have you thought of doing this? Why not pass a law that lets us do this? And so you do end up, I'm not denying that the small jurisdictions, whether that's St. Kitts and Nevis or the Bahamas or the Marshall Islands or whatever, have been a problem. They are only a problem in a very limited way when it comes to where the money goes in terms of the large amounts of money that's laundered. It's laundered through large economies because it's a large amount of money. And so you have to move it through large money flows. So the problems remain, you know, Switzerland, London, New York as you would imagine, Singapore, Hong Kong, and so on. And yet it's very difficult for an organization which is”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transaction above a certain size had to be reported, which was the US approach. They said any transaction that you have suspicions about has to be reported, which is to say that they're essentially bringing bankers into the policing system. And they're basically saying to money launderers, you have to blow the whistle on yourself if you're going to have any information about money laundering being passed on to the authorities. You have to ask the money launderers to essentially report themselves, which doesn't really work, as you would imagine, which is one of the reasons why the system that we have is so disastrously ineffective, except it does have a very good record at producing paperwork. We have an astonishingly expensive bureaucratic paperwork heavy anti-money laundering system, which generates hundreds of thousands, if not, depends on the country. In the United States, it generates millions of reports every year without actually doing anything at all to stop money laundering.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What remains to this day the premier body in trying to coordinate anti-money laundering, which is called the Financial Action Task Force, which has created at the G7 in Paris in the late 1980s. It was sort of created almost by accident. President Mitterrand at the time had a sort of an insider trading scandal to deal with and in order to show how serious he was about tackling financial crime, he sort of chucked in fighting money laundering into the G7 agenda. And then we ended up with this, you know, almost by accident, this sort of international bureaucracy to do the job for us. And this has kind of expanded the US approach to tackling money laundering globally, but with a small twist, which is that they added to the US approach a little bit of a UK approach too, which kind of essentially made it useless. The UK is very good at enabling financial crime. It didn't really want to stop enabling financial crime. So essentially, instead of saying that any”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, essentially, what you had, instead of just corrupt banks in Florida, is you ended up with entirely corrupt jurisdictions. I mean, the most amazing example perhaps is Panama, where the entire government became, because Panama had been sort of, as were hived off by the United States. And so it used the US dollar and everything. It was connected to the US banking system. So all you had to do was fly your money down to Panama, stick it in the bank, then it came back again. But the same was happening in lots of the British offshore jurisdictions and so on. So, you know, it remained an astonishingly crude, very cash-based money laundering operation. And, you know, so obviously what you needed was a form of international cooperation to stop this happening. You couldn't do it in one country because it was so easy to move the money around. And this gave birth to, you know, at the end of the 1980s.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became like an arms race between the authorities and the money launderers, which is the authorities would try and put a check in the way of laundering money. And then immediately the money launderers would just invent a way around that. And, you know, the key way that they invented at this point when it ceased to be so easy to put money into banks in Florida anymore was just to put your money on a plane and fly it to the Cayman Islands, Panama, Anguilla, all the other little jurisdictions which are within easy reach of Florida, of which, of course, the Bahamas is right there next to Florida. essentially money laundering became international at that point. It ceased to be just a Florida problem.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started enforcing Wright Patman's Bank Secrecy Act. And it just caused complete brain melt for all of the money launderers who suddenly had to think of ways to get money into the bank without just being able to turn up with a car load of banknotes, you know, because they could only pay in $10,000 at a time. And some of the ways that they came up to get around this were sort of brilliantly ingenious. My particular favorite was done primarily in Puerto Rico, but also in other places where they would let it be known that if you won the lottery, they would buy the winning lottery ticket from you for more than its face value because, you know, they would give you the cash and then they could take the lottery ticket to the lottery company and say, there you go, I've won. And they did this very happily for ages until one money launderer won the lottery two weeks in a row, at which point the authorities got a little bit suspicious and that revenue for money laundering was closed. But it became that what it's become ever since.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was working on the first anti money laundering operation, which launched in 1980. It took them about 10 years to really get going, which they called Operation Greenback. And some of the stories he told me were just hilarious in terms of how crude it was. There was this one story about, you know, when they were on a stakeout on a bank and, you know, the guy turns up with his car full of cash to pay into the bank, you know, goes into the bank to get a trolley. And then when he comes out with a security guard, by the time he comes out, someone had stolen the car. So this car, which is full of banknotes, has been stolen complete with all the banknotes. And he says, oh no, someone stolen my car. And the security guard runs in and goes, oh, call the police and the cash courier just tackles him and goes, no, no, no, don't worry, just call me a taxi. I'll be back tomorrow.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, there's this big financial and economic boom in the sort of years after the Second World War. And, you know, that was not just good for the economy as a whole, but also really good for the criminals. They boomed alongside the rest of the economy. And particularly this was good news for drug traffickers. There was this big sudden demand for all kinds of drugs, and they were happy to satisfy that demand, particularly by importing drugs to Florida, which was very easy to reach from the kind of places that grow marijuana and cocaine. So you ended up with this unbelievable quantities of cash, which was flowing into Florida, which was distorting the entire American financial system. And the way that, you know, used to launder this money in the good old days before, you know, Wright Patman came along and spoiled it for everyone, was you took the money in a giant box to the bank and you paid it in. And I was talking to one of the detectives.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That actually the financial system has a responsibility to police the money that flows through it was genuinely revolutionary.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, the challenge that he faced, and the challenge that everyone trying to tackle money laundering faces, is that you can have this idea that you tackle money laundering, but it's essentially so easy to move money between countries that the actual genuine concrete steps that any one country can take are severely limited. So he had this congressional hearings, which are full of like wonderful anecdotes about criminals moving money offshore and stuff, you know, before offshore was even a word that was used. But actually, in terms of what he could do was much more limited. And it was mainly about how much cash you could pay him to the bank at any one time. So, yeah, the $10,000 limit was, that was him. Also, the limit of how much money you can take out of the country without declaring it. And a couple of other things. But, you know, so the actual meat and bones of the legislation is pretty limited, but the conceptual idea behind the philosophy.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the financial system, many people, many bankers used to call him not right Patman, but wrong Patman, he managed to get his piece of legislation, which is now called the Bank Secrecy Act. That's not its official name, but that's what people tend to call it. He managed to get it through Congress in 1970. And that was the birth of anti-money laundering as an idea, as a legislative program. And so everything that the world has done since then essentially derives from this one idea that this barefoot kid from Northeastern Texas had when he rose to chair the banking committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. An amazing guy. He did so much more than that. And really, he deserves a full doorstep biography of his own.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focusy down home politicians who were called populists at a time when populists didn't mean what it currently means, but meant instead someone who actually genuinely fought for the people. In the 1960s, he got a real bee in his bonnet about what was essentially a side effect of the early stage of globalization, which was how easy it was for criminals to move their money to places like Switzerland and hide it from the authorities. And so he essentially invented the idea of anti-money laundering before Wright Patman. The financial system was essentially just pipes through which money flowed and where that money came from was no more the concern of the banks than it was of interest to sewage companies what you have for dinner. But Wright Patman insisted that banks had a responsibility to the society in which they exist, that they too had a responsibility to check up on the money that flowed through their system. And despite a lot of opportunities.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be so pleased to talk about Wright Patman. I think he is a really unfairly forgotten American politician of a kind of very American kind who rose from pretty much nothing. I mean, he was a barefoot kid in a impoverished corner of North Eastern Texas, you know, in his childhood in the early 20th century. And he rose to being a member of the U.S. Congress where he held his congressional district for, well, from the late 1920s all the way up into the 1970s. And he had a number of driving characteristics of which the main one was a really lifelong distrust of the financial system. And what he used to say was a determination to stand up for the little man or the simple folk. He was one of those really...”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you very much for that. And I'm really excited to be talking to you or two, sir. I feel like you and I write about very similar things in overlapping ways. And so I'm hoping that I might be able to ask you a few questions as well today.”
2026-02-01 · Intelligence Squared · Why Can’t We Stop Money Laundering? With Oliver Bullough · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT