Big Banks Started Laundering Massive Sums of Drug Money In the 1980s … And Are Still Doing It Today

For More Than 30 Years, the Big Banks Have Been Key Players In the Drug Trade

It has become mainstream news that at least some of the big banks are laundering staggering sums of drug money. See this, this, this, this, this, this and and this.

But you may not know the scope or history of the problem.

Official statistics show that huge sums of drug money are laundered every year:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) conducted a study to determine the magnitude of illicit funds generated by drug trafficking and organised crimes and to investigate to what extent these funds are laundered. The report estimates that in 2009, criminal proceeds amounted to 3.6% of global GDP, with 2.7% (or USD 1.6 trillion) being laundered.

This falls within the widely quoted estimate by the International Monetary Fund, who stated in 1998 that the aggregate size of money laundering in the world could be somewhere between two and five percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Using 1998 statistics, these percentages would indicate that money laundering ranged between USD 590 billion and USD 1.5 trillion. At the time, the lower figure was roughly equivalent to the value of the total output of an economy the size of Spain.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/u-s-banks-started-laundering-drug-money-decades-ago-still-today.html