Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough review – a jaw-dropping exposé of money laundering From handbags to drug gangs to central banks – one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters reveals the surprising links in a global chain of crime
Question: why, if almost half of us now use cash only a few times a year, are high-denomination banknotes being printed in increasingly large numbers? In April 2024, the value of all the dollar bills in circulation reached an all-time high of $2.345tn, and may well be even more than that by now.
The total value of dollars in the world has doubled every decade since the 1970s. Similarly, there are 1.552tn euro notes in circulation, while most other currencies – the British pound, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc and so on – are all at something like their highest levels in history. This at a time when so many of us have pretty much stopped using cash altogether, and even the people who sell the Big Issue in our streets are equipped with card readers.
When I talk about “us”, I mean those who don’t have to worry about hiding huge cash profits from drug dealing, people-smuggling and so on. And that of course provides the answer to the question: while law-abiding citizens like you and I have to jump through hoops when we move even relatively small sums around for entirely legitimate reasons – buying a fridge or a secondhand car, say – drug dealers just shove bundles of the stuff into their coat pockets or suitcases and whisk them round the world in order to keep their business going. The number of dogs trained to sniff out cash at international airports is growing, but nothing like as fast as the rate at which big-denomination notes are being pumped out by the world’s central banks. And the ways in which money is laundered are growing in complexity and sophistication.
“Money laundering”, by the way, is an expression that started in 1920s Chicago, when Al Capone and his friends had to cope with this same problem: what to do with their vast bundles of greenbacks. They created or co-opted chains of laundries and other small shops to disguise the profits from bootlegging, then bought high-value items such as houses and entire companies (not to mention cops and politicians) with the cash that had been washed clean; “laundering” was a witty way of describing the process. Nowadays the number of men’s barber shops that have sprung up in Britain’s towns and cities may well hint at a new version of the process; though the salivating reporters from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, hoping to link the Middle Eastern haircut with people-smuggling, drug dealing, immigration and the rise of “lawless” Britain, never quite managed to prove the case. That doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t one, of course.
Oliver Bullough is one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters. He is thorough, his sources are impressive, and he has a lovely, easy style which takes us through some of the darkest features of the world’s economy. He also has a fine sense of moral purpose, which puts his reporting on to a different level from the show-and-tell paperbacks that fill airport bookshop shelves. As his excellent books from the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse (plus his reporting for Reuters from Chechnya, the scariest war of modern times) showed, he seems to be completely without fear. In the nasty, complex business of reporting international money-laundering, courage is perhaps the most important quality…