Enter the likes of Jiyuan Ma. An unassuming 42-year-old from Dundas Valley in Sydney’s north with no criminal record, Ma’s work as the coordinator of a money laundering syndicate that “washed” an eye-watering $59 million in 18 months through a suburban daigou business can now be revealed after he pleaded guilty to one count of intending to use money as an instrument of crime.
How to wash $60m: Inside the shadowy world of money laundering
JOHN O’SULLIVAN: Boris Gives an Energized Curtain Speech. “It didn’t sound like the speech of a man who was bowing out of public life.
Quartz: “The stratospheric wealth of the top 0.1% in the US is hard to conceptualize but a new paper (pdf) from the National Bureau of Economic Research thinks the total share held by the super wealthy is likely much higher than previously estimated. The authors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman analyzed the work of a 2021 Princeton Economics paper which claimed that wealth held by the top 0.1% in the US was about 16% of the nation’s wealth in 2016 and concluded that “wealth is less concentrated among the very rich (the top 0.1%) than many believe…
Due to the lack of administrative data on wealth and the complex holding structures and tax-planning strategies of the ultra-wealthy, one has to combine a variety of data sources, make assumptions, and be open to revising earlier approaches when new information emerges,” wrote Saez and Zucman. Instead, a more accurate picture of the share of the nation’s wealth held by the 0.1% sits at about 20%, they say…”
America’s billionaires are twice as rich as previously estimated
The New York Times: “A new documentary about the Holocaust opens with photos of perhaps the most familiar faces from that dark chapter of history: those of Anne Frank and her family, whose story has been read or seen by millions around the world. So why would a six-hour film that offers fresh illuminations about America’s response to the Holocaust begin with such well-worn images? The answer is likely to surprise even those who know all about the arrest and eventual deaths of Anne, her sister and their mother. Their deaths, the documentary argues, were also a stain on the United States and the foundational myth of its benevolent open door for “huddled masses” of immigrants and refugees. As recounted in “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” Ken Burns’s latest deep dive into America’s past, Otto Frank tried desperately to seek sanctuary in the U.S. for his family “only to find,” the narration says, “like countless others fleeing Nazism, that Americans did not want to let them in.” Seeing no other recourse, he arranged for the construction of the Franks’ ill-fated hide-out in Amsterdam. Premiering on Sept. 18 and airing over three nights on PBS, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” aims to upend other longstanding historical assumptions as well, and also draw a thematic line connecting past tragedies and current struggles…”
Open Culture: “This fall, historian Timothy Snyder is teaching a course at Yale University called The Making of Modern Ukraine. And he’s generously making the lectures available on YouTube–so that you can follow along too. The first lecture appears above. Subsequent lectures will be available on Yale’s YouTube Channel. And you can find the syllabus here.”
