Wow, A Blog Entry! Neil Must Have Woken Up Briefly

A month and a half without a blog entry isn't really a long period of time.  Indeed, it could be looked upon as a prolonged (or in my case entirely typical) period of laziness.  Yet I feel rather guilty at having neglected my blog and the audience that has come to enjoy reading it.  Said audience consists largely of my parents and, according to the statistics page, a bunch of Russians I've never heard of.  Still I should start writing my blog again or, alternatively, pick up the phone and call my parents.  All sorts of exciting things have happened over the last couple of months and I have recorded none of them.  OK, I don't know for certain that exciting things have happened but its statistically likely somewhere in the world yet their occurrence has gone unmarked on my blog.  Somehow the world has kept turning.  I guess that answers the age old question about whether if a tree falls in a forest and nobody asks a stupid philosophical question does it still crush a squirrel?  The answer to the more traditional version of that question is, of course, "no" ask any physicist.

In my defence I should point out that it hasn't been sheer laziness that has stopped me from making blog entries.  Or to be more accurate (and honest) it hasn't been only sheer laziness that has stopped me from making blog entries.  I have been busy studying for a diploma in Applied Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorist Financing something which sounds far more interesting than it actually is.  This has eaten into my blog writing time.  With the course triumphantly completed (note, I don't say "passed") I can get back to more important things.  Such as writing mindless inanities for a barely existent audience.  Since an inanity is mindless I suppose I can also add tautology to the list of grammatical crimes I have cheerfully committed on a semi regular basis since starting this blog.  It's good to see that I have returned to the field in top form.

Speaking of the diploma it is a little disturbing to note exactly how many of my friends reacted to news of my studies with comments like, "so, you're qualified to launder money now?".  Actually I'm not.  You need law or accountancy qualifications to do that.  Money laundering must be the only crime which requires more study than simply obeying the law.  One thing that I have learnt over the preceding nine months is that money laundering largely exists because nobody really wants to stop it.  Well, of course they want to stop it but they're not prepared to do what is required in order to achieve that goal.  In much the same way as a fat person wants to be thin but isn't prepared to give up eating nine meals a day.

It is actually quite easy to stop money laundering.  Ruthlessly enforced customer identification laws, transaction reporting and a decoupling of every secrecy jurisdiction from the global financial system would take care of most of it.  The only problem is if we did that the entire financial sector would find it rather difficult to operate (if only because most of their top management would be in gaol).  We'd also start to see a lot of impoverished refugees from places like the British Virgin Islands, Macau and Delaware.  The average customer in the street would probably be a bit annoyed at having to provide a DNA sample every time they wanted to open a bank account as well.

The truth is money laundering laws work like all other laws.  They're really just there to tell you why you're going to prison on the offchance you get caught.  There is an unspoken compromise between those who enforce the laws and the rest of us.  Essentially enough safeguards are put in place to ensure some people get caught so that the law doesn't appear completely useless while at the same time nowhere near enough safeguards are put in place to ensure that crime is eradicated completely.  This might not sound like a great way of operating but it is unlikely that human society would be improved terribly much if all of us were in gaol.