Oliver Bullough | The Awful Consequences Of Moneyland Are Compounding

Yeah, it's great to be here.

Yes, I suppose it's an inevitable consequence of the combination of globalization and greed. The core problem, I think, with the way the world is organized, or the way the world has come to work, is that money operates internationally, but the laws that restrain money—whether that is taxes or limits on money laundering or financial crime or whatever—those laws only work nationally, or, you know, at best regionally. And so if you own enough money to move it around, if you can afford to move your money between countries, then you have an inevitable advantage over everyone else because you can move your money to a place where no one can find it. Now, you know, as you know, as it were, to get ahead of the people who will inevitably write in to tell me that I should be more sympathetic to the needs of refugees and so on—yes, this is true. There are certain people who, as it were, have a need to move their money to places where the authorities can't get it. Switzerland dined out for decades on the fact that it had supposedly, and rather spuriously, helped Jewish refugees hide their wealth from the Nazis, which it may or may not have done to a small extent, but it certainly was in no hurry to give it back afterwards. It is of far greater significance that tax dodgers, particularly very wealthy citizens of Western countries and kleptocrats and cartels and mafia groups, are able to take advantage of financial secrecy to move their wealth around, to hide it from the authorities, and therefore to evade any accountability for the crimes they have committed. That's the really big deal here. Essentially, there is an inbuilt advantage for the owners of wealth who can afford the services of expensive lawyers, accountants, and so on, to move their money outside the reach of their authorities. And this is corrosive to democracy. It's corrosive to accountability. It's corrosive to everything that we like. So yes, to answer your question, Moneyland—what I call Moneyland, which is this sort of, as it were, virtual country where the wealthy can keep their wealth—Moneyland is an inevitable side effect of the combination of partial globalization, which is globalization for money but not for legislation, along with greed. And that isn't just the greed of the owners of wealth. It is also the greed of their advisers, what I call their butlers in my second book, you know, because often, although it's the offshore centers like the British Virgin Islands and so on, Switzerland, that get criticized for accepting this wealth and hiding this wealth, they often don't do it of their own accord. They often get, you know, at the very least, advised by foreign professionals of how to do it. And in the case of quite a lot of offshore centers, the legislation was in fact entirely written and grafted onto their countries by, you know, foreign advisers, whether that's lawyers from the UK or the US or wherever. So yeah, there's a whole system, and basically, to cut a long story short, it means that if you're rich, you can get away with stuff that you can't if you're not.

Well, it's a really interesting question about optimism. When I was researching Moneyland, actually before I'd even come up with the idea of writing a book about corruption and offshore finance, just when I was mainly looking at corruption in Ukraine or corruption of money in and around Ukraine, coming out of Ukraine, I was so appalled by what I was discovering that I essentially assumed that all I had to do was tell someone about it and all of these problems would be solved. It was, you know, but that didn't happen. And then I suppose I assumed that the problem was so terrible that it would definitely be solved before I wrote a book about it, right? That I probably needed to hurry up and get the book out because otherwise the problem would be solved before the book was published. But, you know, I have become a little bit less naive since then. I'm still optimistic. You have to be optimistic, really, otherwise you'd give up and become a money launderer yourself, you know, and there's no point in being pessimistic because that just means the bad guys have already won. But it can be at times difficult to continually explain, you know, to people in positions of authority the significance of what it is you're talking about and hear them say, 'Oh, yeah, that does sound significant.' And then nothing ever happens. That can get at times a little bit wearing, but you know, you just carry on. I mean, it could be worse. I could have to work for a living.

I don't think so. I mean, I think it's all right to plead ignorance to particular some of the more baroque details of what criminals get up to. Criminals are incredibly entrepreneurial. I mean, one of the things I really enjoyed with this latest book, in a way—I mean, if 'enjoyed' is the word—was just some of the details of how criminals move money around, the degrees of imagination involved. You know, I feel that if some of these money laundering gangs had set their mind to solving climate change or something, then, you know, the problem would have been solved decades ago because they're just so good at solving problems. So, no, I think, you know, anyone in a position of responsibility now has to be aware not only of what's happening and how it happens, but also of the consequences of it. That I think has become grossly obvious to everyone from, you know, at least the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, if it wasn't obvious before that. But I suppose what I get into in this latest book, Everybody Loves Our Dollars, was trying to work out and explain why it is that efforts to solve this problem—the problem of money laundering and unaccountable offshore wealth—you know, why they've failed. Because, you know, I would get contacted, not all the time, but also not infrequently, after my previous two books about money came out, by people working in government or law enforcement or banks or whatever, telling me that I was being a bit mean, that I was critical of their efforts, and actually they were working really hard and doing their best, and couldn't I recognize that at least they needed a little bit of credit for that. And so, you know, enough of them had contacted me, and I'm not here to be mean to people, you know, I consider myself to be a relatively nice person temperamentally, and I wanted to—if they were genuinely working really hard—I wanted to give them credit for that. So I took them at their word and decided to analyze why is it that if there are lots of people in banks and law enforcement and government who are working really hard and they do care about this issue as much as I do, why have they completely failed to solve it? Because they have. The best estimates that we have of the volume of money being laundered around the world as a proportion of the global economy have remained unchanged since the '90s. And since that time, the world has built up a huge and incredibly expensive and extremely intrusive system for checking financial transactions. And I think that actually there is a surprising lack of public concern about how intrusive this system is. It is amazing the powers that governments have essentially delegated to banks to check our, as it were, private and secret financial affairs. But having given themselves these very intrusive powers, governments have totally failed to solve the problem they've been setting out to solve. And that is really interesting because governments, if they set themselves the task of solving a problem, they tend to be pretty good at solving it. You know, you can look at deaths in road traffic accidents or diseases like smallpox or whatever, which the government just said, 'That's a bad disease. We should get rid of that.' And in surprisingly short order, they did. So that hasn't happened with money laundering. On the contrary, money laundering is booming. It is easier now than it's ever been. And why is that? You know, that's a really interesting question, and that's the question that I sort of set out to answer in the book.

I mean, it is fascinating the degree of inconsistency and incoherence in society's response to financial crime. And in my quest for a convincing metaphor in the book, I was trying to imagine, you know, the authorities building a fortress around our economy to keep the criminals out. And yet although some bits of the walls of that fortress are astonishingly well fortified, and you know, slipping criminal wealth through financial institutions is obviously not impossible because it happens all the time, but you have to be pretty sophisticated. It requires quite a lot of forethought and planning in order to outwit their, you know, automated red flags that they put up over any suspicious transaction. But at the same time there is this amazing parallel economy that entirely runs in cash which no one gives any thought to at all and which is booming. I mean, I think it is really counterintuitive to a lot of people the fact that cash usage in all actually pretty much all countries on earth—I imagine particularly in developed countries—cash usage is plummeting. You know, it wasn't that long ago in the UK when, you know, what, 10, 15 years ago, about 50% of transactions involved cash. Now it's fewer than 10%. The decline has been precipitous, and that is true not quite as steeply in, say, the United States or in the European Union, but you know, really that decline is mirrored everywhere. And yet the amount of cash being printed by major central banks just goes up and up and up. You know, it hits, you know, a record high every month in the United States. Same, you know, the same is true to a lesser or greater extent absolutely everywhere. And where's the cash going? You know, because we only, you know, central banks issue to us cash if we want it. You know, that's the deal with cash. You can buy it if you want it and sell it back to them for the same price if you don't. That's why, you know, cash is a useful thing to have. But we don't want it. We should be—if central banks, you would imagine if they had a problem, it would be that they had, you know, more cash than they know what to do with, it was just piling up in rooms somewhere because we kept giving it back to them. But on the contrary, you know, in the United States, they're having to build a whole new factory in Maryland to keep up with demand for cash. And where's the demand coming from? So you have this really extraordinary weird situation where governments are imposing these really onerous and expensive checks on banks that banks have to do on their customer deposits, while at the same time they are printing more cash than it's pretty much possible to imagine to allow the criminals to outflank those same checks. And so it's like with one hand they're punching you in the face and the other one they're shaking your hand, or with one foot they're stamping on the accelerator and the other one they're stamping on the brake. It's completely bewildering how stupid this is. And the thing is, it's not like I broke any news here, you know? That's what's so sort of strange about quite often what I do is I feel like I'm just writing about stuff that everyone already knows and yet nothing ever gets done. That's what's, I mean, kind of annoying, I suppose.

Yeah, I don't know really. I suppose there is a role to be played in society by the fool, you know, like in the medieval court, you'd have people whose job it was just to be inappropriate, to say the stuff that everyone knew but no one said, you know, and I do feel a bit like that sometimes, that I'm just the person, like the annoying kid brother in a family gathering who stands up and points out that Auntie Shirley is cheating on her husband and, you know, Uncle Colin drinks too much. But maybe that's my job. Just to be the person who says we're spending $200 billion a year on compliance every year and yet at the same time, you know, the US government is exporting $100 billion worth of $100 bills. Where are they going? You know, why are we spending all this if we're also making money out of that? You know, why don't we just stop doing both? You know, and they net out above and below the line, you know. So I suppose there's an element of that because it isn't just that the money laundering system that we have is really expensive, although it is. I mean, $200 billion a year, which is what banks spend on compliance.

Globally, $200 billion. If you could, with $200 billion a year, you could, according to the UN estimates, you could provide clean water and sanitation to everyone on earth and enough food to everyone on earth, and you'd have $50 billion left over. That's a lot of money right there. And it's achieving nothing. And you know, and there should be far more consideration about that. So it isn't just that the system is really expensive. It's completely ineffective. It is totally failing to do the job which it's supposed to be doing, which is to stop money laundering. And it's also—and I think this is a really important point from the book which I'm really keen to get across—it's really unfair. The people who are affected by our system of tackling money laundering are the people who are already disadvantaged above all. If you are rich, even if you are a financial criminal, it doesn't much matter. You will always find someone who will take your business. But if you are poor and you look like you might be a financial criminal, no one cares whether you are or aren't. They will just kick you out of a bank. That's what happens. And you see this happening en masse globally, whether that's in the UK or Australia, in the US, Canada, European Union, everywhere. You see this with Muslims en masse because Muslims are suspected of involvement in financing terrorism to a far greater extent than other ethnic groups. Muslims have distinctive names which they often share with many other people. So you'll see someone's name in a media report and you don't know if it's the same person. And if these people are poor and they can't, they're not really generating fees for a bank, they'll just be debanked in a flash because why bother doing the checks? Why bother taking the risk of moving terrorist money if you don't have to? And it isn't just disadvantaged communities who are being affected. It's also disadvantaged countries. There's been some really troubling research by the central bank in the Bahamas. And you know, okay, special pleading, the central bank in the Bahamas is often criticized for being a tax haven. But at the same time, if you look at the work that they've done analyzing the international checks made by the Financial Action Task Force, which is a global money laundering watchdog set up by the G7 back in the 1980s, if you look at the checks they make on countries, you could predict the results that those checks would come back with, not with no knowledge at all about the financial system of the country, but based entirely on whether that was a poor country and whether its population had black or brown skin. And that's a really worrying situation that we have. If we have a system that is by its results objectively racist, then it should at least be looked at to ask whether there is a deep underlying reason for that. Um, you know, and if that's the result that we end up with, you know, and it's for good reasons, well, it's sort of worrying and suspicious, but okay. But there's no reason to think that it is for good reasons. It's just that we have a system that, you know, is prejudiced against poor countries. And that's stupid because that's not where money laundering happens. Money laundering happens in Manhattan, London, and Switzerland.

No, no, that's the amount of money that—I mean, this is an estimate from LexisNexis, the, you know, international information company. That's the amount that LexisNexis estimates that financial institutions spend complying with laws against financial crime.

But that isn't obviously—the shareholders aren't going to be spending it themselves and sucking up that cost. They're going to be passing that cost on to their clients. So that is, you know, money that society is spending tackling financial crime. It isn't called a tax, but it effectively is a tax because governments are forcing private institutions to spend it. So even though it isn't going via the government, it may as well be a tax. So it is a tax on society.

Yeah, I mean, I totally understand that perspective, but I think the problem is that it's based on a flawed assumption, which is how money laundering works. Money laundering doesn't only work via banks. There are many other ways of moving money around, and it's really actually—money laundering is an annoying term that we've ended up using partly because it doesn't involve any actual laundering. Obviously, it's metaphorical in that regard, but more importantly because it doesn't necessarily involve any actual money. We're not talking about money. We're talking about value. And value can move around the place in many forms other than money. Yes, it can go via a bank account. And yes, it can go via a big box full of banknotes. But you can move value in the form of a used car, in the form of a shipment of cocaine, in the shipment of luxury watches, of handbags, of anything at all, in oil, in grain. Anything which has value, that value can be manipulated to move excess value from one place to another. And this is a far more significant problem than the financial system simply because it is completely—really, I mean, by the standards of the financial system—essentially completely uncontrolled. How do cartels move their wealth around? Yes, they use crypto and yes they use cash, but they also use really large quantities of manufactured goods that they ship from one place to another and they hide their, you know, profits and losses in the shipments. This is how the Medici used to bank in Renaissance Florence. And it's how criminals still bank today. And so the problem is that I completely agree with you that banks have a responsibility to the societies in which they're based not to move criminal wealth. And I don't have any problem at all about governments imposing rules on banks to force them to live up to that responsibility. What I do have a problem with is that we have a really stupid system where governments don't appear to have realized that it isn't only banks that move criminal wealth around, and that if you're going to have any chance of stopping it, you need to impose similarly strict checks on the movement of other things as well as the movement of electronic money. Otherwise, you're just going to end up with all of that criminal wealth moving via different channels completely uninterrupted. So we essentially impose very steep costs, both in discrimination on poor Muslims particularly and in fees on businesses and ordinary people. We impose those strict costs on everyone without actually achieving anything because we've created a really incoherent and inconsistent system where if you can't get a bank account, you can just use cash or move money in the form of used cars like Hezbollah.

Yes. Yes. I mean, I know what you mean. Obviously, you know, using a financial institution bank account is super easy and useful and convenient and criminals would like doing that as much as everyone else does. So, yes, there should obviously be checks there, but it isn't sufficient. If you look at—I mean, you mentioned crypto. If you look at a lot of modern money laundering methodologies which have been exposed in the last couple of years, and we see this with Russian propaganda organizations, Russian spy agencies, just Russian ordinary criminals, we see this with Chinese money laundering gangs, we see this with the cartels in South America, that the cash-for-crypto swap business is absolutely huge. You know, you hand over cash and then receive and exchange crypto, and crypto is used for moving essentially value from one country to another. But within that country, you just use cash. That's completely outside of the regulated financial system, unless you consider crypto to be regulated, which it sort of kind of is a little bit in some places, you know. So that is happening completely in the dark. And I think that the problem is it's a little bit like that joke about, you know, it's not a very funny joke, but anyway, it is technically a joke. That's the structure of a joke with a policeman walking along, you know, on his rounds at night and he sees a drunk guy scrabbling around on the ground under a streetlight and he says, 'What are you doing, sir?' And the man says, 'I'm looking for my keys.' And he goes, 'Did you lose them here?' And he goes, 'No, I lost them in the park, but it's dark over there, so I'm looking where I can see.' Um, you know, and it's a little bit like that with where the government is looking for criminal money. It's like, well, it's really hard to look, like you say, in cash and crypto, and it's really hard to look in the trade network. Possibly impossible. So we'll look where it's easy to look, and it's easy to look in the financial system because all you got to do is search through a spreadsheet, and you can automate that. Now, the criminals know this as well as anyone. They are as well networked and significantly more entrepreneurial than pretty much everyone else. So they know where the government knows to look and they know where it's easy to find stuff. So they adapt to that and they just operate elsewhere. Um, so you know, it is a—it's just a very badly designed system and it's very expensive and it's discriminatory and it's completely ineffective. That's the problem. So yeah, I mean, I'm not coming at this from a particular political viewpoint except for the political viewpoint that I really don't want there to be financial crime and that's my main overriding interest because, you know, I see the terrible damage it does pretty much everywhere and it's doing ever more. You know, I suppose I don't just consider this to be a financial crime problem, but this is a democracy problem. You know, this ever-growing, you know, gravitational pull of the offshore money is beginning to rip apart the structures of democracies. In, you know, we see this at the moment in the United States very dramatically. But I think that—I don't think anywhere is safe.

Well, I mean, I think—I mean, you know, the part of the world that I know best, apart from the bit that I'm looking at from my window, is the former Soviet Union. Yes, it is beautiful today. Green and lovely. Nowhere is more beautiful than Wales in April. That is a hill I'm prepared to die on, and we have a lot of very lovely hills.

Anyway, the part of the world I know best apart from this bit is the former Soviet Union. And I moved to Russia in the late 1990s when Russia had a chance to build democracy for the first time in its history. And you know, there are many competing explanations for why it failed. Maybe it was an impossible task. Who knows? Maybe building democracy in a big country like Russia and as spread out and as diverse as Russia is, is inherently impossible. I don't believe that. I think anywhere can be democratic. But I do think that the way the country's elite was able to steal everything and then having stolen everything to stash their wealth outside the reach of the government, essentially to create an alliance between the government and financial crime so they became the same thing. I think that that meant democracy was impossible to build because it was impossible for any rival interest group built on the will of the people rather than just the will of the wealthy people—it was impossible for that to influence the country's money. And that, you know, we've seen in lots of other places all across the former colonies of Africa and South America. We've seen the same thing happening whereby a very small class of people have basically monopolized the country's resources, stashed their money offshore, and allowed their offshore wealth to project influence back in an unaccountable way to their homeland. That's the problem.

No, I see—I don't agree with that because I think that there is something fundamentally different about the modern globalized economy compared to previous economies. I mean, all current democracies have been at a time not democracies. I mean, particularly if you look at European countries, you know, Britain, France, whatever. How did those countries that were not democracies become democracies? It was an incredibly slow, laborious process with lots of missteps and backwards and forwards. And obviously, they're not perfect today. But the really important point—and I'm, you know, very influenced by the argument that Mancur Olson makes about the development of states—the really important point is that you get a time when the interests of the owners of wealth become aligned with the interests of ordinary people, that they all want, you know, better roads. They all want, you know, law and order on the streets. They all want courts that function. They all want, you know, essentially an efficient and an effective government system. And that is the pathway that creates an efficient state, an effective state, and eventually a democratic state. You know, that I think is—I mean, it's an argument I find very convincing. Where the system with somewhere like Russia or somewhere like Nigeria or somewhere like Bangladesh is different is that those countries came essentially to democracy, to freedom, at a time when there was a fundamentally different form of the economy, which is that it was possible to move your money outside of Russia or Bangladesh or Nigeria to keep it elsewhere but to still have power and influence over your own country, which essentially means that the government of those countries became—it was almost like they were colonizing their own country in a way that you didn't see with Henry VIII, for example, or Louis XVI. That was a different system. So that form of globalized—you know, I mean, Mancur Olson makes a distinction between roving bandits and stationary bandits, that roving bandits would go around stealing stuff from people and then they became stationary bandits and just established themselves in a group of people and predated from them all the time, and that's the beginning of government, that's when you get an alliance between the powerful and the weak. But what we have with what's happening in Russia or Azerbaijan or wherever is offshore bandits, people who essentially don't really care about the long-term future of the society that they govern because they can just keep extracting wealth from it. And that is fundamentally different and that's a Moneyland story. So, you know, I do think that the system we have with globalized wealth but nationalized regulations is very corrosive if we let it be to the long-term future of democracy.

Yeah. And I mean, I do think there is an important consequence of crypto here that I don't think has been adequately discussed, and this I think it might be something I might address in a future book, that say what you like about a tax haven. Right? This is a stupid thing for me to say because I have, you know, been on record for being a bit critical of tax havens in the past. It's—say what you like about a tax haven, at least it's a country, right, that you can diplomatically pressure and that you can have some form of political engagement. You know, the British Virgin Islands does have pressure points as a country that you can influence. And you know, so does Switzerland. Switzerland held out for the longest time, but eventually the United States and other countries managed to force Switzerland to reveal the secrets of its banks to them. You know, that has happened. That isn't the case with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies don't have a country. They're just everywhere and nowhere. You know, you've ended up with a globalized form of money that is accountable only to its owners. Privatized money is a really worrying invention. And you know, it's always talked about as if it's a, you know, a repository of freedom, but it's only a repository of freedom for the people who own it. It's not for anyone else.

I do. I mean, I do. I just find crypto people extremely irritating. I find evangelical people really irritating in general, to be honest. But I find crypto people particularly irritating because I feel like that they're, you know, it's so much special pleading of like, 'Oh, this is so amazing. This is going to change the world.' It's like, no, it's going to change things for you. It's not going to change things for anyone else. It's certainly not going to improve things for anyone.

I mean, listen, I'm not, you know, I'm sure—I mean, it's weird, isn't it? The blockchain, everyone held up the blockchain. It was going to be the answer to everything and then everyone's forgotten and now it's AI is going to be the answer to everything, you know. I mean, I'm sure the blockchain is a useful piece of technology in a sort of, you know, plumbing of the world kind of a way and maybe it could be repurposed in a useful way, but you know, I'm currently writing an article that the edits I'm going through at the moment are about, you know, a Russian cryptocurrency called A7A5, which, you know, was created by a partnership between a convicted fraudster and a state bank to help Russians dodge sanctions, you know, and that is a really potentially incredibly powerful development as a way to create a new form of financial system totally outside of any other government's oversight but allowing you to project, you know, influence into the world. And that's something we should all be really aware of and worried about. And the idea that everyone is just looking at this as—

An unmitigated good thing is, I think, very shortsighted.

Yeah, I mean, financial innovation is always a myth, really. There's no such thing as financial innovation. You're just coming up with new ways of doing things that have always been done in the past, but wrapping them in a new acronym and making it look clever and new. But it's always the same old thing, and it takes you 10 or 15 years for the governments to catch up and say, 'Oh, yeah, God, yeah, we already had rules against that.' It's like, well, a bunch of different exchanges of value.

This one can't be seen by these people. This one can be seen by those.

Yeah. I mean, I think the really important point to get to, I think, and it's something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently, is the relationship between money and power. Why aren't money and power the same thing? You know, why is it that if you walk down the street in Wales where I live, that, you know, someone who's got more money isn't immediately able to do whatever they want? And, you know, the reason for that is that there are other alternative sources of power, whether that's the court system or the media or, you know, or politics or whatever.

Or just society in general, you know. But the more that rich people are able to break free of the chains of that society and the chains of those institutions, the more that money and power will just be the same thing. And we'll return to, you know, a medieval system. And if you look at statistics for inequality, you know, in a lot of societies, we've gone back in terms of the inequality of wealth in society back to where we were in the years before the First World War. And that is worrying because, you know, you end up with...

If you look at figures for the United States, you know, the wealth inequality in the US is very comparable to what it was back in the Gilded Age. Now, if you look at figures for Russia, it's more unequal now probably than it was under the Tsars, which is kind of extraordinary. Um, you know, I mean, there are different... I mean, the same is true in places like China or in India. I mean, this is often conflated globally. If you look globally, the situation with wealth inequality has actually been quite good over the last 30 or 40 years because of the impact of the rise of China, which meant an awful lot of very poor people have risen, um, globally into the ranks of the more sort of middle income. But if you look within countries, within China, within India, within the US or wherever, you see this steepening inequality almost everywhere. You know, inevitably, inequality leads to other forms of inequality. That's just the nature of people. And, you know, and that's something I think we all need to be much more aware of. So essentially, sort of underground underneath everything that I write about, whether that's, you know, offshore finance or money laundering or whatever, it's just about the owners of wealth figuring out ways or being given ways to evade the responsibilities being placed on them by everyone else and them to say, 'No, I'm wealthy. I don't need to listen to you because you're not.'

Yeah, it is. You're right. It is only a part of it. You know, the more powerful you are, the more, you know, your financial misdeeds are not actually criminal because you get to write what the laws are and therefore decide what is and isn't criminal. You know, in this book in particular, I was focusing on money laundering because, you know, it's a very interesting subset of, you know, financial misbehavior with its own particular philosophy and history. I suppose in previous books, particularly in Moneyland, I was very careful to make the point that the institutions and innovations of the offshore financial world, whether that's offshore trusts or shell companies or numbered bank accounts or whatever, these were not invented for financial criminals. These were not invented for the cartels or the mafia or even, you know, for the KGB. These were invented to allow wealthy people to dodge taxes. That's where the demand always is. So, you know, the first British Virgin Island shell companies were sold for US people to dodge US taxes. You know, Swiss bank accounts became popular to help French people dodge taxes. You know, this is always the way. Jersey, for example, as a tax haven grew up because British people wanted to dodge taxes or particularly people from the British Empire who didn't want to put their money in the UK. You know, the overarching story all the way through. So there isn't a distinction really, if you look at the money, there isn't a distinction between money laundering and other forms of, you know, financial misbehavior, whether that's tax dodging or just kind of general, you know, gray behavior. You know, it is always done by the same institutions and the same structures designed by the same people. You know, there isn't really a distinction. A really important point again going back to crypto: if you're looking at the people who are really profiting from crypto at the moment, you know, yes, there are various billionaires who are doing very well out of it. But also there's quite a lot of family members of senior administration officials in the United States. You know, there's that alliance between different forms of power, political power and financial power. You know, that's been embedded at the heart of this always.

I think it's very...

It's very interesting in lots of countries. We see this to a certain extent in the UK as well, where our own sort of right-wing party, Reform UK, is very extensively funded by crypto people. I find it very interesting that there is this alliance between right-wing populists and crypto people that somehow has managed to persuade a significant proportion of the population that they're on the side of the, you know, the ordinary man and woman, you know, that they're not just like every other rich financial group. They're just going to rip everyone off for their own benefit because that's always what happens. You know, it really interests me that that propaganda job has worked so successfully. And I'm, yeah, I'm interested by how that is. And actually, I think, to be honest, that this is very much to the demerit of, you know, as it were, the old progressive classes. The fact that they've been presented as being so out of touch and so sort of, you know, self-serving is really, it's a real failure by the traditional leftist parties and something I think they should be much more aware of, that it's been so easy for such obvious fraudsters to present them as being themselves fraudsters is a pretty bad sign for their own propaganda skills.

Well, I mean, there's so much to it, isn't there, about the skills of finding wedge issues and stuff. I mean, you see this in the US debate in particular all the time. I mean, the fact that they managed to make your opinion on abortion somehow correlate with your opinion on the top rate of tax is kind of extraordinary, you know. And yeah, it's very much to the credit of the propagandists who managed to achieve this. But I mean, I think the rest of us should be a little bit more aggressive in pushing back against it, maybe.

Yeah, I know Peter really well. We were good...