## EVERYBODY LOVES OUR DOLLARS: How Money Laundering Won

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [EVERYBODY LOVES OUR DOLLARS: How Money Laundering Won](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2026/06/books-el-khoury.pdf)

## Other formats

- [Markdown version](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2026/06/books-el-khoury.pdf.md)
- [Structured JSON version](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2026/06/books-el-khoury.pdf.json)

---

### Overview
- Author: Oliver Bullough; reviewed by Chady El Khoury.
- Genre: Investigation of global anti–money laundering (AML) framework and its effectiveness.
- Central claim: Despite decades of global effort, money laundering has not been meaningfully curtailed and has expanded with the global economy.

### Scale of the problem
- Persistent estimate of illicit finance: "roughly 2 to 5 percent of global GDP."
- Observation: As the world economy has expanded, criminal finance has expanded in proportion.

### Analytical contributions
- Shift in focus:
  - From individual crimes to systems that allow illicit proceeds to circulate, expand, and blend into the legitimate economy.
  - Emphasizes structural and systemic drivers rather than isolated criminal acts.
- Critique of analytical foundations:
  - Traditional reliance on suspicious activity reporting by financial institutions is increasingly disconnected from reality.
  - Much laundering bypasses the formal financial system through trade-based schemes and informal value transfer mechanisms.

### Focus on informality
- Key insight: Significant illicit activity operates in informal or semiformal channels beyond the reach of current AML architecture.
- Historical continuity: Informal techniques are described as "the most ancient ways of laundering—rooted in barter, trade, and trusted networks that predate modern finance."
- Mismatch identified: AML frameworks remain overwhelmingly oriented toward the formal sector, creating a structural blind spot in:
  - Cash-based economies
  - Trade networks
  - Informal intermediaries

### Emerging risks
- New technologies and vehicles:
  - Crypto assets
  - Stablecoins
- Effect: Enable faster, more opaque cross-border transfers and complicate the AML landscape.
- Overarching dynamic: "Money laundering continuously adapts, often faster than the systems designed to contain it."

### Systemic contradictions
- Coexistence of conflicting policies:
  - Efforts to combat illicit finance alongside policies that attract capital into real estate, luxury goods, and financial markets with limited scrutiny.
- Role of professional enablers:
  - Characterized not as conspirators but as actors responding to incentives embedded in the global financial system.

### Policy assessment and gaps
- Strengths of the book:
  - Effective diagnosis of systemic blind spots and reframing of money laundering as a macro-critical concern.
  - Concrete case examples illustrating laundering techniques that evade formal controls.
- Limitations on solutions:
  - Policy discussion is relatively high level.
  - Call to rethink the system lacks detailed operational guidance, especially for:
    - Addressing informality
    - Managing cross-border complexities

### Conclusion
- Sobering reflection: A meaningful share of global efforts may still be directed at the wrong targets, using tools that no longer match the realities of money laundering today.

*Review by Chady El Khoury*

---


_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2026/06/books-el-khoury.pdf_