Everybody Loves Our Dollars: A Conversation with Oliver Bullough

Yeah, it is funny. It is funny thinking back to that in 2014 when, you know, I rather naively discovered, apparently for the first time, who knew, that Britain was involved in, you know, the structuring of kleptocratic services. It was something which I was not aware of. I think many people were, but I was so shocked that I thought I should write a book about it. And I was so sort of appalled by what I was discovering and writing about as I was writing it that I assumed that the problem would be solved before I got the book out. You know, it was like this was so urgent and appalling that this couldn't possibly be allowed to continue, that the grown-ups would step in. And yet mysteriously here I am, the third book. And the problem remains not solved. In fact, you know, when we had the conference last year and I spoke at that and I was talking about, you know, the alarming signs coming from Washington about the American approach to financial crime, I don't think either of us would have anticipated the sort of unraveling that's happened over there with regard to so much in this particular area. So, you know, I don't think I'm going to run out of things to say. And yeah, maybe there'll be another book. Who knows? But in terms of this book in particular, you know, the last, the two previous books about financial crime, they were quite critical of, you know, governments, law enforcement agencies, you know, financial institutions, compliance departments, you know, just across the piece, I was quite nasty about everyone. And people occasionally would get in touch and tell me I was being a bit mean and unfair and that they're working very hard and all doing their best and they care about it as much as I do and it wasn't very nice to throw stones at them when they were working really hard. And so, I mean, I found that really interesting, to be honest, because, you know, taking them at their word, they are working hard. They do care as much as I do. If that is the case, why are they failing?

The dial has, I mean, in fact, it has moved. It's moving in the wrong direction. Well, I mean, you know, as far as we can tell statistically, as a proportion of the global economy, the, you know, the criminal aspect of it is exactly the same now as it was back in the 1990s, despite the fact that in that period we have built, you know, a gigantic and incredibly intrusive bureaucracy of fighting financial crime and terrorist financing, which, you know, infiltrates deeply into, you know, I think to an actually underappreciated extent, deeply into the, you know, personal affairs of ordinary citizens. You know, the governments have awarded themselves and financial institutions really remarkable powers to, you know, infiltrate our, you know, innermost sanctums, stuff that would have been totally off limits not that long ago, and it's achieving nothing really. So, you know, why is that? Because when governments put their mind to achieve things, they tend to achieve them. I mean, it isn't, you know, if you look at, you know, the records against diseases, records against road traffic accidents, you know, all sorts of efforts that governments make, they are successful. And yet when it comes to tackling money laundering, not.

Well, so I mean, to talk a little bit about the Financial Action Task Force.

Yeah. I mean, you can, yeah, I mean, I do think if there's a takeaway message, one thing to remember is in the money laundering world, if something is a big deal, it has a four-letter acronym. You know, if it's a three-letter acronym, it may be important, but you can skip over it. But four letters.

Big deal. TBML. Yes. Exactly. You know, CMLNs, but the, and so on. But the Financial Action Task Force, which is, you know, having its event at the Barbican, you know, which is great, well done, but, you know, which drives so much of the debate and the framing of the question of how to tackle money laundering, you know, I found it very interesting just going back into the origins because part of what I do always is if there is a situation that's a problem is to try and trace it back to the beginning because I find it really interesting to see if there is a, you know, a flaw in the conception of something, which, you know, an original sin, if you will, which gave birth to this much greater problem. And the interesting thing about the Financial Action Task Force, which is this, you know, very influential, very important, again, very intrusive organization with a tremendous amount of, if not formal power, but a tremendous amount of influence in terms of what happens. You know, it was created by accident, really, in response to a very French insider trading scandal in the late 1980s. You know, chucked into the bottom of a G7 communique.

And it wasn't the Financial Action Task Force with big letters and the definite article. It was a financial action task force with small letters and an indefinite article, which became, by a weird bureaucratic accretion which no one appears to have decided, an institution no one intended it to become. And its formal, its principles, its recommendations were drawn up in a hurry in 1989 by a limited, a small group of an already limited group of countries, none of whom really knew what they were talking about. And then, okay, those recommendations were expanded upon in 2001 after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to counter terrorist financing. Again, in a hurry by a group of countries who didn't know what terrorist financing looked like. So you have this sort of crystallized series of ideas which never get re-examined and never get reconsidered in the kind of, you know, deep sense that they should be. Instead, it's just like, let's just keep doing more of the same. We're going to have more of the same. All we need is more suspicious activity reports. We need more, you know, mutual evaluations. We need more blacklisting of random countries. It's, you know, it's maddening, to be honest.

So the Marshall Islands is a, I mean, it's a really interesting place in lots of ways. Very unusual. I mean, in terms of the surface area of the Marshall Islands is roughly equivalent to that of Washington, D.C., but it covers an area of ocean approximately equivalent to Mexico. So it is a very scattered collection of atolls in the Pacific Ocean, about approximately equidistant between Hawaii and the Philippines, which is to say a really long way from both of them. It's a long way from anywhere. And, you know, with no disrespect to the Marshall Islands, and I think most Marshall Islanders would agree, not very much happens there. It's a big center of tuna fishing, but otherwise it really struggles to make a living. The reason I wanted to go there was because it was one of the nations that was blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force in its first ever blacklist at the end of the 1990s. It was another, you know, four-letter acronym, the Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories, which were deemed to be not with the program in tackling money laundering and therefore were frozen out of the global financial system until they got their act together. Now, the reason I wanted to go there is because it was just an extraordinary thing to do to anywhere. The idea that you would say to them, you haven't gone along with what we want. Therefore, you are now, you know, in Coventry. We're no longer to talk to you at all. And it's a particularly weird thing to do about a place where there is no money. Like, you know, the Marshall Islands is, you know, if you go there, it is very important to have a large supply of quarters and dollar bills because that's what you use to pay for taxis to get anywhere. Otherwise, there's just nothing there. You know, it is a place where, you know, a major source of local nutrition is white rice and Spam. You know, it is not a wealthy place. There are no, you know, lobster restaurants. There's not, you know, none of that. It is a, you know, beautiful, fascinating, incredibly poor, really struggling, and very threatened by rising sea levels, as you'd imagine, of climate change. And yet this was the kind of place that was chosen to be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force as not being compliant with its recommendations. I mean, even more random would have been going to Niue, which is an associated territory of New Zealand, but that was too remote even for me. I would have had to go all the way to New Zealand and then quite a lot of the way back again, and I couldn't frankly be bothered. But the Marshall Islands felt like far enough. But the reason I wanted to pick it out was because it was really indicative of this, like, deep hypocrisy which is embedded in the center of the whole thing, is that everyone involved knew where money laundering happens. Really, money laundering happens in Miami, New York, London, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, places like that. It is big financial centers. Inevitably, dirty money goes where there's clean money because money flocks together. It goes through financial institutions, whatever. There are no financial institutions in the Marshall Islands apart from the branches of American banks. That's it. So, like, it obviously wouldn't be a center of money laundering. And it's maddening that they decided as a first thing to do would be to target a place like the Marshall Islands. And that's why I wanted to go there. I wanted to find anyone who could explain the situation to me and what it meant to them. And all I found out was this continued just total bafflement about it. It was like a Godzilla had come down and whacked them and then gone away again. It was like, why did that happen? You know, and they had no comprehension. It wasn't, you know, regulating money laundering to them was like as important as regulating winter sports. It was just, you know, new.

Well, I mean, the issue with the Marshall Islands is the Marshall Islands does have a ship registry, it should be said, and there is an associated company registry that goes with that. It's actually by far the best-run institution in the country. So, you know, but that registry is actually headquartered in Virginia. You know, all of that is run out of the United States. It was created with a grant from the United States when the Marshall Islands became independent, and it was initially owned by the son of the US ambassador to the Marshall Islands. So if you're going to do anything about that, why are you looking in the Marshall Islands? The solution is obviously in Virginia. And the same, I mean, it is a, you know, it was just indicative as well of the hypocrisy of the whole process that while there was this criticism of the Marshall Islands for having its own corporate registry, there had been a similar process going through the United States to have a, you know, know-your-customer regulations which had not gone through Congress. They had fallen apart because of political opposition, and the United States isn't blacklisted for its failure to get this through. And yet the idea that the Marshall Islands' failure to get it through its own political process was somehow so terrible that they should be blacklisted. Or, I mean, you know, the government of Niue said, we only have two lawyers. You know, we're going to do this, but we just don't have anyone to write the legislation because they've got other stuff to do, but they'll get to it. Didn't matter. Blacklisted anyway. You know, Nauru, which was a place with lots of problems. You know, the president of Nauru was at the time when they were blacklisted was in Australia having an operation to have his toes amputated, unable to get home because the national airline had gone bust. And, you know, you could have said, well, can you just give us a bit of time? You know, we'll sort this out and then blacklisted anyway. You know, so it is a, it is a process essentially, you know, the FATF, to my mind, of essentially, and this actually the Central Bank of the Bahamas has done a study into this, and I think it's very convincing what they've done, it is a process of punishing small, diplomatically isolated countries inhabited by black and brown people while excluding genuinely egregious behavior by countries in the global north.

Well, I mean, so I spoke to quite a lot of people who've been involved in, you know, FATF plenary meetings in the kind of process, the where you draw up the decision of which countries are going to be called out and criticized, you know, because there is a formal process where you have these mutual evaluations, experts go examine a country, look into its legislation, look into whether that legislation is enforced, and they take those findings to the plenary meeting. And if you are the Marshall Islands, at that point your fate is already sealed. You know, you have no one to represent you in the plenary meeting. You're done. If you are at that point the United States, you start having conversations with people and saying, well, you know, could we not raise up our score there and our score there and, you know, and it all, you know, the favors are done for people like they always are between the people who are around the table, you know, are not the people who are on the menu. And that's the process that you see. I mean, I think it will be genuinely fascinating to see what the outcome of the mutual evaluation is of the United States, which is coming up very shortly. You know, we have a situation where the United States has reneged on its commitment to having open, well, not open corporate registries, but sort of vaguely accountable corporate registries. You know, which is still like way behind anything in any other Western countries, but still would have been an improvement on what they have. You know, they have unleashed crypto on the world in a way that is, you know, immeasurable and at the moment and continuing with a degree of sort of complicity between the crypto companies and senior members of the administration which is almost unimaginable. And, you know, is the FATF going to blacklist the United States? And if it does, it will cease to exist, you know, and that's essentially the situation.

I'm wondering who's playing Trump and who's playing Zelensky in this particular scenario.

I was wondering whether he'd be, you know, telling off President Trump, you know.

No, exactly. I must say I was told that the incoming administration was fully briefed on the fact that the FATF evaluation is coming, and so far the searchlight hasn't sort of crossed the FATF as far as Donald Trump's concerned.

It was, yeah. So I mean, so this is going into the origins of the Financial Action Task Force. So I mean, to go back in time a little bit from that, just because I think it's quite funny. President Mitterrand was at the time the head of state in France. He had a group of sort of close political allies, including the former bodyguard of Trotsky. You know, it was all very French, and there was this brilliantly French political scandal where a French state company was going to take over an American company, and a number of close political insiders, including the former bodyguard of Trotsky, accidentally bought shares in the American company just before it was taken over by a French state company and ended up making quite significant personal profits from this. It's just one of those things, could have happened to anyone. And, you know, the media in France were having quite a lot of fun with this sort of, you know, socialism for you and, you know, crony capitalism for us type vibe. So Mitterrand, in a kind of needs to get on the, you know, the front foot slightly, sort of, you know, Alastair Campbell spin operation, says, right, you know, we've got the G7 coming up next year, it's the anniversary of the French Revolution. We're going to take action against money laundering, right? That's it. We're going to, you know, we're going to really stamp this out. Which, you know, it was good. You know, financial crime, it really changed the agenda. It was a problem for him. It became an asset for him. This came as a huge surprise to the other members of the G7 who had no idea that he was interested or concerned about this. But they were all like, okay, well, in that case. So you can read in the UK, go down to Kew and read the, you know, the UK government files in which there are all these memos from rather snarky, you know, senior civil servants back and forth saying, well, the French don't appear to have any idea what they're talking about, but the Americans want this and the Italians want this and the Canadians want this. And eventually they came to this sort of summit agreement. And then the summit agreement, which came up with the idea of forming a Financial Action Task Force, was born. It was at the bottom, right down there, you know, sort of to actually, interestingly, alongside climate change at the bottom as a future concern of something to deal with. And then you can read in the archives the communications that went back and forth about how to, you know, turn this idea into a reality. What would a Financial Action Task Force look like? You know, what would be its recommendations? And the Americans, who invented anti-money laundering. One of the stories I most enjoyed telling in the book was the story of a US congressman called Wright Patman, who I think has been completely unjustifiably forgotten. Really amazing guy who sort of managed to push through the world's first anti-money laundering legislation. And in America, financial institutions were obliged to report all transactions above a certain size. You know, all cash transactions above a certain size and various other things. And then they were dumped essentially on law enforcement, who then had to look through this wild, huge amount of paperwork to find out where the suspicious things were. This is what the Americans wanted the Financial Action Task Force to recommend for everyone else to do as well. And the Brits looked at this in absolute horror and were like, well, this is going to be a huge amount of paperwork. And we don't really want to have to deal with that. That sounds like, you know, a lot of, we're going to have to employ a lot of people. Could we not find someone else to do it? So they came up with this idea that banks would not report all transactions. They would only report the suspicious ones, which is where the suspicious transaction report came from, is that essentially they didn't want to have the paperwork. They wanted to privatize the law enforcement. And it is, on the face of it, quite sensible to say, why employ all these people when the banks could do it for you? But essentially what you're asking, you're doing, is saying we will outsource the detection of money laundering to money launderers because the only people that could report suspicious transactions are the people engaged in the suspicious transactions. So, you know, it is a, you know, the flaw at the heart, really, of the failure of the FATF was right at the beginning, you know, and you can see, actually, quite entertainingly, if you talk to almost any bank compliance officer, they will say one of the most annoying things is they file, you know, a gazillion suspicious activity reports and they never or very, very rarely get feedback about whether they're useful or not. But in that file there is actually feedback from one of the first suspicious activity reports when, you know, when literally there's a letter to the Cabinet Office from the bank saying, why haven't you told us whether that was useful or not? You know, right there at the beginning, you know, the problem started right at the very beginning, you know, and that is, but the problem with, you know, the suspicious activity report as the answer to everything, you know, is baked in, you know, right at the beginning.

I mean, it made sense in the sense that there were far fewer transactions, therefore there would be fewer suspicious activity reports, as you say. Everything was sort of a, you know, a paper-based system or a telex-based system. Everything happened much more slowly. And it made sense in the context of the fact that, you know, no one really knew what they were talking about. Money laundering, as far as they knew, is what happened in Florida in the eighties. You know, if you watch Miami Vice, that's what they were talking about when they talked about money laundering. So as a response to a specifically 1980s phenomenon of essentially people bringing large amounts of cash into a bank, paying it into a bank, receiving a cashier's check, taking that somewhere else. You know, that was what they thought money laundering was. That's what it looked like. There's an answer to that with a relatively small volume of transactions and everything taking a bit of time. It was theoretically possible that it could have been a decent solution. But this is part of the problem that I try and write about is that the architecture around money laundering was designed by the G7, actually, was designed by Britain, America, and Italy within the G7. And those three economies, although they all had money laundering problems, the money laundering problems they had were very similar because they were countries with a developed financial system, you know, well integrated with each other and so on. If you look at what money laundering looks like in China, what it looks like in the Middle East, what it looked like at the time in South America, it was completely different. You know, you had trade-based money laundering, you know, much more like the traditional Medici style of moving value around. You know, that suspicious activity report is completely useless for that because the money isn't moving by the financial system at all. And this is part of the issue is that the people around the table, both in terms of choosing who to punish, the Marshall Islands, or choosing what to do to get who to police it, the bankers, has always been from a limited group of countries who are quite similar to each other who just don't understand the full spectrum of what the phenomenon is that they're attempting to tackle.

Yeah. I mean, sort of pageantry is, you know, when, you know, warfare turned into, you know, the changing of the guard. You know, it's kind of magnificent and wonderful to look at and a great tourist attraction, but probably not much use when it comes to repelling an invasion from another country. You know, hats are great, uniforms are fine, but at the end of the day, if the Russians are going to invade, you probably want someone else and not, you know, the Horse Guards. You know, that's kind of what I'm talking about.

I mean, yeah. I mean, listen, they do a great job. They do a great job in a difficult situation, but, you know, and I wouldn't want to have to sit on a horse all day, you know, I mean, particularly with the tourists like trying to make their horse move. Anyway, getting distracted. But what I mean about the sort of the compliance function is that you have this, you know, essentially, I mean, you're employing essentially thousands of people to sit in Warsaw and say no, no, no, no to endless numbers of false positives on their, which have been generated by their, you know, financial alert system. You know, it is, you know, incredibly inefficient, unbelievably expensive. I mean, I think, you know, one of the most amazing statistics is this one from LexisNexis about the cost of global compliance. You know, more than two hundred billion dollars a year is spent complying with laws against money laundering by the world's major financial institutions. And what you could buy with two hundred billion dollars. You know, I chose just to look at the UN estimates of how much it would cost to supply food to everyone in the world who's hungry and clean water and sanitation to everyone in the world who's lacking them. That would cost one hundred and fifty billion dollars. So you could do all of that and still have fifty billion dollars left over for the cost of the global compliance system, which is failing to stop money laundering. And that's what I mean by regulatory pageantry. It's just this gigantic ceremonial system which is not fulfilling the function that we would like it to fulfill. It is fulfilling a different function, and perhaps we'll get on to what function it actually fulfills, but it's not stopping money laundering.

I certainly think it's one of the places we should be focusing our two hundred billion. So TBML, trade-based money laundering, is the movement of value not via the financial system but via the trade system. You know, it is, if you look at how, say, Hezbollah moves value around the place, it tends to move it in the form of used cars. Buy a load of used cars, ship them from Canada to the Middle East, sell them at the other end, and hey presto, you've moved value from one to the other without having moved any money. If you look at how the Chinese money laundering networks move their value around, it's almost entirely in the form of stuff rather than in the form of money, simply because the capital controls in and out of China are so strict that it's very difficult to move money in and out of those countries. I mean, this is the reason why I talk so much about Bicester Village because in one of the less glamorous places that you travel to. Maybe it is glamorous, but it's cheaper. It is cheaper, easier to get to, direct train from Marylebone. You know, the passion of Chinese money laundering gangs for buying expensive handbags is not because, you know, they want to look fabulous. Well, maybe they do, but it's not only because they want to look fabulous. It's because it's a very concentrated store of value for moving value from one place to another. And I mean, it's really, I mean, I found very interesting as a demonstration of how integrated that form of money laundering is to the formal economy. If you look at the, in France last year, there was a suggestion that there was a limit for French tax residents. They could only spend one thousand euros in cash in a shop. And there was a suggestion they would reduce that limit for everyone, including non-tax residents. And there was a huge outcry from the French luxury goods industry because this would cost them so many sales. And, you know, the French luxury goods industry is a very influential lobby in France because it's a huge, big employer and everything. You know, they were so appalled by the idea that they would bring in this limit because it would cost them so many sales. Those sales are essentially Chinese money laundering networks. I mean, there may be other people, a few other people who buy ten thousand euros worth of handbags for cash, but let's face it, not very many. That is cash that's being generated and moved around by another acronym, CMLNs. And, you know, that is a sign of how important this is as a driver of trade and how influential it can be in the economy and why it's so hard to do something about. We also saw this with the black market peso exchange, yet another four-letter acronym, the BMPE, which was a very important driver of trade between North America and South America. Cocaine was all going in one direction, but you weren't moving the money back in the form of money. You were moving it in the form of manufactured goods. So this is a really big driver of sales for, say, Caterpillar, other big American manufacturers who were, you know, the proceeds from the cocaine traffic is spent in North America and then exported back to South America. So it is a really important part of the global economy, and that's one of the reasons it can be quite hard to do something about.

No.

I'm a skeptic about everything.

The OG producer I did also go to. The OG producer is in Washington DC. So, I mean, America is a wonderful place and there are things that are open in America that aren't open in other countries. So, I mean, we print money in the UK. It's the De La Rue factory. Um, you know, secret, secret. But they print money for us and many other places. You obviously print money in the Eurozone as well. But the Americans, because they like things to be open, you can visit them and see where the money is printed. So the one in Washington was the initial money printing factory, but they ran out of capacity back in the 1980s, which is sort of weird because, you know, that was a time when people were moving away from using cash. Um, you know, that was a time when people started using checks a lot more, credit cards were coming in much more widely, and yet they still had a great enthusiasm for cash. So they opened a much bigger facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Great tourist attraction if you are in Fort Worth. I highly recommend it. It's open. They're very, very hospitable to visitors. Um, you go in and it is absolutely jaw-dropping watching the operation. It prints somewhere between 80 and 90 banknotes a second, every second. So when you see them going past on these huge green printers, which are, you know, longer than this room is wide, and they move so fast it's just a kind of greeny blur, and they go to the next guillotine, chops them up, and then they get packed up, packed onto pallets, and they'd be moving these pallets of cash around all the time. It is, you know, they print, yeah, one and a half million notes a day. It's really an amazing, incredible operation. Um, and but even that is, you know, and they've expanded the printers, so now they print 50 banknotes on a sheet rather than 32. Um, but even that isn't keeping up with demand. They're opening a new factory now, building a new factory in Maryland because, you know, if previous trends continue, the value of all the US dollar banknotes in circulation doubles every decade. So, you know, at the moment it's about $2.4 trillion. They reckon about five trillion by the middle of the 2030s. They need a whole new factory to keep up with that. What's weird about that is there isn't demand for banknotes. If you look at, um, society's use of banknotes in the US, it's only 14% of transactions now are done with cash. Those transactions are smaller on average than electronic transactions. In the UK it's even fewer. In the UK it's now fewer than 10% of transactions are with cash, and those are again smaller than average. And yet across the board, in all pretty much, not quite all, but most developed economies, the value of cash being printed and distributed by central banks is going up all the time. It hit an all-time high in the Eurozone in December. It is an all-time high in the US every week. It's yet another all-time high here as well. It's almost 100 billion pounds here in the UK. It went up by 7 billion pounds last year, which is 100 pounds for everyone in the country. And this paradox of where is the cash going? What's the demand for the cash? If we in society are not using it, you know, we are no longer buying it off the central bank. We're giving it back to the central bank. And yet somehow there is a demand that more than cancels out our lack of demand and is in fact so much that it's going up all the time. Um, that the paradox of banknotes was first identified by Andrew Bailey, now the governor of the Bank of England, back then the chief cashier in 2009. Um, and he came up with a few explanations for it, you know, which I'm not going to go into because they're quite nerdy. But, you know, we know that none of them are right because so much time has gone past that you can see that the circumstances he described which might explain what was happening have all gone. They're no longer relevant. So there is somewhere a gigantic source, like a colossal source of demand for cash, um, which because in society we have, you know, the opposite, we are a supply of cash from society into the central bank, and there is no really, no concern, no curiosity in central banks about where that demand is. But it is obvious to me that that demand has to be from criminals excluded from the financial system by compliance who are instead essentially transacting with each other in the form of cash. And just to put that into perspective, when I talk about a colossal supply into the criminal market of how much cash that is, the Federal Reserve estimates that about 70% of the dollars they print go abroad. They leave the United States. Um, about 80% of the dollars they print by value are $100 bills, despite the fact you hardly ever see a $100 bill, which means if you just do the math that about a hundred billion dollars worth of $100 bills are exported from the US every year, which means that as an export industry it's more valuable to the US economy than pharmaceuticals. It is a colossal business and this is happening all the time and it's particularly irritating that at the same time as this is happening the major Western countries are creating the cash that is facilitating money laundering on a massive global industrial scale. They are simultaneously making very expensive demands on financial institutions in poor countries that they should abide by these regulations that they themselves are flouting and allowing to be flouted. It is, you know, it is hypocrisy on a sort of geopolitical scale which, I, you know, never gets called out.

I'm really, really pissed off about this because it isn't just a cost in money terms on the financial institutions. It's not just the fact that there is a $200 billion cost of global compliance which is not being paid by banks. It's being paid by banks' customers. Obviously, you know, banks aren't just absorbing this cost. They are passing it on in fees to everyone else. So this is a cost being levied on everybody. But there is also a cost that is far more serious and that isn't measurable by money, which is the cost on people who are losing their access to the financial system because they've fallen foul of compliance. You know, 450,000 people lost their bank accounts in Britain in the most recent reporting period. Almost half a million people, you know, or 450,000 bank accounts were closed. Maybe some people have multiple bank accounts, but, you know, we're still talking about a colossal number of people, you know, and those people are overwhelmingly poor and Muslim because they fall foul of checks on counter-terrorist finance. You know, I spent quite a lot of time talking to a group of people with ethnic Somali heritage to whom this happens, for whom it is completely normal to lose your bank account. You know, that is something that they are just accustomed to. It is like a really distressing thing to being Somali. It is, you know, but, you know, literally I'm very aware of what the reasons are for this. You know, I was talking to a Somali community leader from Birmingham and I said, 'Why do you think this keeps happening to you?' And she said, 'Well, it's because I'm poor and then there's this.' And she's wearing a hijab and she's black. So she just did a circle around her face. She knows what the reasons are for why this is happening, you know. So it isn't just that this is very expensive. It is excluding already marginalized people from the economy on a scale which is almost unimaginable and which never gets discussed. You know, when we talk about debanking, we talk about Nigel Farage. You know, I do not think what happened to him was right. Um, I think he was right to be pissed off about it. Um, but if he'd been a different person, he could have stood up and said, 'This has been very distressing, look at all the other people this is happening to,' you know, and he could have led a campaign which would have really highlighted this. He's not that guy. Um, and that's a real missed opportunity because it is a massive problem. Not just incidentally in the UK, this is happening in Canada, in the US and the Eurozone. It's happening everywhere where it's been studied. You know, this essentially excluding of, you know, it's not just Muslims, it's also happened to Russians after February 2022. Ordinary Muslims, ordinary Russians. While at the same time, as you may have noticed, this has not stopped terrorism. You know, these regulations were brought in in response to the 9/11 attacks to try and crack down on al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Taliban are back. You know, this hasn't worked. And yet, it is happening all the time. So, yeah, I'm pissed off.

That's true. I mean, that was... people could read about it.

Even closer than Bicester Village. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was, yeah, that was great.