-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 9:30 PM -0700 on 5/13/02, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Seems to me that most of our economy is arguably illegal. Fine. Document that, please. Show me statistics. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right? >> $4 trillion worth of foreign exchange alone happened today. > > Much of it illegal. Fine. How much. Say it with numbers, please. > For example some large proportion of the > capital formed in Ireland sneaks out, and then re-enters in the > guise of foreign capital. No problem. How much, exactly? Even a reasonable estimate will do nicely, if you can point to actual data. The biggest number I've heard for money laundering worldwide for instance, over the last 6 years ago since Black Unicorn threw it around at DCSB in 1996, is a mostly made up number in the several hundred billion-dollar annual range. Compared, again, to, regulated, monitored, bank-to-bank foreign exchange of several *trillion* dollars a *day*, it's chicken feed. Illegal drugs are probably a few tens of billions of dollars a year. Timmy Leary quoted $50 billion in the early 80's at the height of the Columbian cocaine boom. I'll take triple that, now, just for fun. Chicken feed compared to the global commercial drug market. Money laundering and drugs are probably the largest illegal businesses. The rest is, again, chicken-feed in comparison to even that. Frankly, the amount of formerly illegal business now declared legal, in a gross sense, has gone up dramatically in the last 10-15 years, think most of Eurasia, for instance, and the number of de-regulated businesses increases that amount exponentially every year. Wait until various moslem dictatorships are freed, and you'll see even more. We're legislating "crime" out of statistical significance, just by making most of it legal, and in spite of the increase of financial crime legislation in the G-7, even before 9/11. Legitimate Internet commerce, boom, bust, or no, is going to be so huge that it will completely swamp the ability of governments to control business at all, much less their own economies and currencies, and, frankly, it can't happen soon enough for me. The pointy end of the stick isn't illegal business. It's anyone who wants to sell anything over the internet, particularly if it's anything that is *transported* over the internet, which, in a geodesic economy, will be the only stuff that matters. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQEVAwUBPOCkdMUCGwxmWcHhAQGbvwgApTqp1zOtoVX8/WRrirtJeOVvW7mO37U4 pkqXBmS3UuBv3JDySwcNv5rlqBhigO+DNmMtDWbosTg9tbmftKtVCK4ikmTbXMu7 JOS9T1QrbckwvT7e7NhjOUO8kv/P6tDo8fdlRNuRgLlrfvTKOJSmHiZEM/U3qhoo I0ao8qlsTpq8vVX5UdioZmw/EP/e251BAo4ngvYEfNgocMUNz7ni4fDdeJEVZy2a WawiGsmoPeQ8H8lCAHYPDWcA6PBimbyyiz2IG5F8njCz+WkH0fAm6FCp7QYrfObt 4jCdnl4iVIKkcaM6M9uTLQQqUJg1cEhq4hSQ1LmtiXQKlvUbkq9Rig== =5lP9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
