BREAKDOWN: The FinCEN Files Show Banks Don’t Actually Care About Stopping Money Laundering
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The massive leak of suspicious activity reports shows how banks let the government know about likely money laundering, then go right on providing services.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.
Today on the Brief:
- Stocks down, dollar up on COVID-19 resurgence fears
- People’s Bank of China says digital yuan needed to fight USD dominance
- 140,000 have claimed UNI tokens
- Judge stops Trump WeChat ban
- Nikola founder resigns
Our main discussion: The FinCEN Files
The FinCEN Files are a leaked cache of suspicious activity reports filed by banks with the U.S .Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The more than 2,000 files, representing $2 trillion in transactions, were leaked to BuzzFeed News more than a year ago. BuzzFeed, in turn, shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who then helped distribute them to 108 publications in 88 countries.
This episode provides an overview of the leaks and explains why they show that, despite lots of PR bluster, banks are happy to file their reports and then keep on banking likely money launderers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This should forever end the notion of blaming an asset for the crimes committed with it. |
| 0:04.5 | Put differently, the amount of USD used for illicit purposes just revealed by this tiny fraction |
| 0:11.4 | of the total SARS that go into the FinCEN system every year makes scams involving Bitcoin |
| 0:17.2 | and other cryptos look like a schoolyard shakedown compared to the mafia. It's a joke. |
| 0:22.7 | It's incomparable. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, |
| 0:31.8 | Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by |
| 0:37.0 | Crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced |
| 0:41.0 | and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, September 21st, and today we are |
| 0:48.9 | talking the FinCEN files. And they told you Bitcoin was bad. This is a trove of financial documents that |
| 0:58.2 | were leaked about a year ago to BuzzFeed News, who then got in touch with hundreds of other |
| 1:04.1 | organizations to comb through this huge amount of data to tell a very damning story about |
| 1:10.3 | how little global banks do to actually stop |
| 1:13.9 | money laundering. First up, however, let's do the brief. Today's brief actually has five rather |
| 1:20.4 | than three topics, but I'm going to move through them a little bit quickly. First up, stocks down |
| 1:25.4 | dollars up, so major European indexes like Germany's Dax and the UK's TFSE are down more than 3% on the day, while S&P futures are also down around 2%. |
| 1:37.2 | At the same time, the dollar index is up 0.5%, suggesting people are moving to the dollar as a safer asset. |
| 1:46.1 | The narrative that I'm seeing that's being used to explain this move is COVID-19 fears. |
| 1:52.7 | A report came out saying that COVID cases were doubling weekly in the UK, and if the trend |
| 1:57.7 | continues, there would be 50,000 cases per day by mid-October. |
| 2:02.3 | There's fear of more shutdowns happening, with Denmark and Greece already having imposed |
| 2:06.9 | some new restrictions. |
| 2:08.6 | We're also seeing some resurgence in the U.S. as well, with 12 states reporting at least |
... |
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