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I picked up Oliver Bullough’s Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won, after a morning walking down Oxford Street. Every so often I’d pass groups of teenagers, all looking totally normal, other than the fact that each was laden with multiple bags of designer goods, trainers and collectibles.
I’d noticed this before, wondering if I was seeing the fruits of credit card debt, crypto winnings, generational wealth transfer, or something else, but could never quite work it out. Especially as the kids in question didn’t seem to be wearing the kind of gear they were shopping for.
After reading this book, it seems pretty clear this was one small, visible, part of the vast and complex international money-laundering ecosystem that is absolutely thriving all around us.
Bullough lifts the lid on an industry that most estimates agree is worth between two and five percent of global GDP – up to five trillion dollars – staggeringly placing the world’s illegal economy as somewhere between Italy and China in terms of size.
Whether you’re already familiar with the acronym ‘AML’ or not, this is a totally fascinating, shocking, mind-boggling read, that provides one of those opportunities to see behind the curtain on how the world really works.
