Kenneth Rogoff Quotes

In the United States there are only two exceptions: banks have to report deposits they suspect to be related to either terrorism or drug trafficking. But if your funds derive from trafficking women and children for sexual exploitation, for example, or from illegal arms trafficking or any other illegal activity, then banks in the US are legally free to accept your money and are not required to report your deposit to the authorities.

I think that a lot of the money - these big bills - is used to facilitate tax evasion and crime.

Reliable numbers about the amount of dirty money around the world are difficult to come by. But according to an estimate by the nonprofit Global Financial Integrity group, $1 trillion vanishes from the developing world's economies every year.

We have never heard of laundering in Macau; money laundering is unheard of. Mind you, my casino, every bit of money - someone says Stanley Ho, you issue me a check of so much money - we don't give that easy.

There will be huge scandals because there is too much money washing around …. And we don’t know who’s behind it.

A very small proportion of the country's black money is in the movie industry. Because we are written about, public attention is focused on us. Do you think there is no black money in other businesses? With the exception of government servants and others who have tax deducted at source, there are tax evaders in every walk of life.

When we started out, there was so much cash involved that it attracted an element you'd rather not do business with.

Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions.

If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.

I'm tired of seeing the press equate Monaco with money laundering.

Only criminals want to use cash.

Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.

Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.

The capping of cash transactions will help the banks reduce cash intensity.

Banning cash transactions over R3 lakh will allow banks to diversify their banking activities into new areas and not mundane ones.

I believe I've always been so successful on the black market for a lot of different reasons.

Hezbollah is notorious for using charities and front organizations to hide its funding sources.

As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.

Economically, ISIS is making money every day on the black market with their oil fields. But they are also putting money in banks. We know where those banks are. We should go after the banks and the facilitators using them.

Black money is a cancer in our economic system, not yet terminal or life-threatening.

Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can't identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.

Every form of payment has some risk associated with it.

The black money issue should not be misunderstood as one of merely avoiding taxes. It is, in fact, a major systemic crime of denying the nation's financial system the proceeds of wealth. Such denial should actually be declared as treason, where opportunities to share the wealth for the benefit of the poor are wilfully denied.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.

There's something fundamentally grubby about the rich paying people to seek out cracks in the system to hide their money.