At least half of the article was a synopsis of Tetlock's books. So as a summary, it was okay. If it gets people to go and read the real research though, it's worthwhile.
I think it's important to call out that 'base rate' means very different things to people who have taken an introductory Stochastics class. When you can bring in the memorylessness property of the exponential distribution, Poisson distributions and gamma distributions you can get some non-intuitive results.
Base rates work pretty well, at least for all cause mortality... hurricane counts per year, and financial markets (over very short time periods). I was using the Good Judgment project as motivation to practice R programming for a while, until one day I saw that literally EVERY person forecasting the ending value of the Hang Seng index tied to my probabilities. Therefore, EVERYONE was calculating base cases from historical market data and entering those results.
I would say that PETTY criminals have difficulty moving money around electronically. Criminals with LOTS of money do not have any difficulty finding an investment bank to handle money movement. i.e. Epstein JPMorgan, WireCard, Lloyds
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/lloyds-says-it-faces-money-...
AML laws are just a compliance cost of actual money launderers. All they do is increase the number of intermediaries involved in a transaction (who each collect their fees).
Embedded within our justice system and the values of our society we have the concept of the protection of the innocent. See William Blackstone's famous quotation: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
If you want to imprison all the murderers, you can accomplish that goal by imprisoning everyone but we don't do this and most people would recognize that the idea is mad.
So the test here for any regulating authority should be, is your regulation harming the innocent in some way? If so, the imperative is on you to find a better way to go after the guilty, if you don't you have become an enemy of the public good and your moral authority is lost. We can get into specific regulations but I think with modern KYC and AML we are absolutely at the point where they contribute to the suppression of economic growth and individual liberties and need to be dialed back.
Very well said. It should also be said that criminals that want to launder money only exist because of government regulation. Sometimes that's totally justified, say with human trafficking, and sometimes not so much, like maybe a marijuana dispensary.
The point being, sometimes undercutting criminal activity can be done be legalizing the activity rather than introducing more types of illegal activities to try and detect the original ones. The cure is sometimes worse than the disease.
That parts fine, it's the collateral damage that's the problem. Laws don't know who're the bad guys and who are the good guys, and sometimes everyone else gets caught up in the dragnet. By all means, stop the bad guys, but unfortunately, they don't easily identify themselves, so we pass laws and apply them to everyone (in theory), but they can end up doing more harm than good.
The $10k rule by the Bank Secrecy Act wasn't indexed to inflation and would be closer to $80k today. So it should be amounts up to $80k that aren't considered worth monitoring, but instead, if you deal with, say, buying and selling cars, you get tripped up by that all the time. It's regulatory red tape overhead that costs a legitimate business extra time money that they could be better spent elsewhere.
what is that link supposed to demonstrate? Lloyds is facing an investigation. So?
As for "Criminals with LOTS of money do not have any difficulty finding an investment bank to handle money movement" what is your evidence for that? And what's the line between "petty" and "LOTS of money" ?
I have multiple ACAMS certifications (the trade group that certifies all of us Anti-Money Laundering personnel who work at banks). And no, the public can't apply for membership.
1) Search WallStreetOnParade.com and read all of the articles about laundering.
2) Read the Mary Erdoes and Jamie Dimon depositions about Epstein involvement. JPM was putting Epstein's bribes through to the Governor of USVI. JPM was 'forgetting' to file the mandatory SAR notices on the $5MM in cash that Epstein was withdrawing each year for victim payments.
3) The Yakuza (as written in Tokyo Vice - the book) use privacy laws to prevent any of their businesses from being tied to them.
4) Read Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the world's worst people launder money.
1) Float. Every dollar that is held in limbo 'for checking' is interest income to the bank.
2) Rabid identification requirements lower the risk of new account fraud (which is paid by the bank).
3) Information on who you're sending payments to is usable by the bank for prospecting and risk analysis.
4) If you read anything about regulatory capture, it explains how regulation is used by incumbents to discourage competition. i.e. No new banks have opened in the U.S. since 2009, when new regulations to prevent banks from getting bigger were passed. <- And now, the biggest banks are MUCH larger.
From 2009 to 2013 only 7 new banks were formed, fewer than 2 per year.
Many industry observers have suggested that the decline is primarily due to regulatory burden, including new FDIC regulations and the 2010 Dodd‐Frank Act. But other influences could have played a role, in particular, the current weak economy.
An interesting read, insofar as what it says about nativist vs immigrant tensions, and how those align with Fourth Turnings. While I'd heard that peak globalism/immigration accompanied the Roaring [19]20's, I was unaware that the same tensions existed in 1850.
I do not think I could distinguish any difference in the NYC of the 1850's vs 1910's (before cars were popularized). Electricity was available for the first time in 1890, but the first application was textile mills. The first skyscraper was 11 stories in 1890? I don't think 1 person in a thousand could distinguish those time periods.
Without getting into it too much, I think folks could. The gilded age (1870s-1890s, give or take) produced a lot of buildings of a different style, and comparing 1850 to 1910 could be clear. Easier still are subways. They might not have been at their fullest extent in the 1910s, but they were quite present beforehand, and nonexistent in the 1850s. But the biggest that your average person could pick out would be Central Park: built in the 1850s, not finished until later.
