Good point. My statement was a bit reductive, I just worry when it comes to creating the kind of blanket ban on stuff that people can work around if they're powerful enough.
This is not true in France. Politicians that have proven fraud are arrested and charged. In France we have Sarkozy, Cahuzac, Fillon that were all charged with crimes.
They were president, minister and presidential candidate respectively. I'd be surprised if it was different in the USA. I'm seeing that trump is also being charged, the system seems to be working.
Consumers payments deserves their privacy, but business ones needs absolutely to be fully traceable.
Could it be possible to use two different yet identical interchangeable currencies, one traceable for making business only, and one untraceable for consumers retail transactions?
loosely i.e.
wages are Business currency converted and paid in Consumer currency, accounted for the amount paid to the consumer in his name
end-users/home/consumer purchases are made from consumers anonymously in Consumer currency, and this is converted converted into Business currency upon transaction, keeping only the consumer name anonymous but tracing everything else
B2B transactions are made in Business currency, fully traceable
... I don't know there is probably still a loophole
Not necessarily, it's only traceable if you generate receipts on both sides. I don't know about EU law, but in the US, you only need to report cash deposits if they're over $10k, and if your deposits are always over $10k (e.g. you're a big retailer or something), another $10k here and there won't raise any eyebrows.
Cash is still king when it comes to corruption since it's easy to exchange it for favors w/o generating a receipt at all.
Can't say in terms of proportion cash vs. non-cash but one might want to watch the Qatargate recent documentary on Arte which shows that somehow a 700k EUR luggage was found in the house of a MEP. Piles of cash sound outdated yet clearly still exist nowadays.
After the Panama Papers and everything like it I've experienced in my life, I truly believe it doesn't matter if very wealthy or powerful people are exposed on anything they do unless it involves what Epstein did. Financial crime is not generally of interest, regardless of how interesting it might be to you and me. Sure this can be used to fight corruption, but why is the system corrupt in the first place? Is this really going to be used against those corrupting influences or is it going to be used as another of the many tools in the drug war?
Of course. By suggesting that I don't think this will do anything about corruption and will if anything be a tool used for corrupt purposes, I don't mean to suggest that there is nothing to do about corruption. Even though I think the solutions to social and economic problems are rarely solved from the top down, I do think the issues can be addressed bottom up. The people have the power and it's only by circumstance that some people appear to hold the power.
True that. The system that we have is the product of many painful lessons, taught to us by global crises and crimes. People, who oppose this system, should stop reading nonsense on reddit and 4chan, and start with books and lectures from educated economists.
I order to participate in the fight again corruption, would you mind sharing with us the list of payement you made this week? Please use the following format :
[date], [time] - [nature of the payement] - [transaction amount] - [beneficiary]
One transaction per ligne, in a chronological order.
That's literally what businesses do, it's called accounting. And if you read the underlying article and/or law, you'd see that this is targeting businesses, not individuals.
There's a special status for some people in Russia, it's called Foreign Agent, and I believe they need to write down everything they spend money on this way