Comment by cluckindan
3 days ago
Considering the amounts being laundered, it seems likely that a lot of the money is ultimately being invested.
If we stopped money laundering totally and completely, and managed to track down and confiscate all that money, the stock market would crash, hard. So would real estate.
The proceeds of crime propping up some aspect of our economy seems like a bad reason to let it continue unabated.
You’re absolutely right, but the people holding millions or billions in illiquid assets are going to disagree.
Lucrum ante valores.
Residential real estate costs roughly tice what it did 10 years ago. A "crash" back closer to fair market prices would be the desired effect.
That would be the desired effect for those seeking to enter the real estate market for the first time, but it would be disastrous for those who took out mortgages in the last few years, and it would be unwelcome to those who owned their homes longer and consider it a large (or only) asset in their personal wealth. I doubt that real estate prices will be allowed to drop much, simply because homeowners vote more reliably than renters, and they won't vote against their own financial interests.
And that would be excellent news, because it would be a "great equalizer". And a more egalitarian world would be much happier.
I see that the more egalitarian world is a must for us NOT going extinct.
And we're in the last minute to do that, if it's not too late already.
World seems to be headed to a short dystopian fascist phase before the collapse. A metacrisis caused by these tax-free metahumans with the tax fee multinational abstraction of individual power called corporations.
Left vs. right doesn't work to solve it, but the true dichotomy of people vs. billionaires with their sycophants.
> Left vs. right doesn't work to solve it, but the true dichotomy of people vs. billionaires with their sycophants.
Also known as... left vs. right. Left: people. Right: billionaires with their sycophants. (Democrats are not left)
It continuously boggles my mind how the American political education is so bad. You're not the first to say something like this.
only if they immediately sold all the confiscated assets. The government that did the confiscation could slowly divest on a schedule to minimize the effect on any markets involved.
It depends on the degree to which the continued flow of ill-gotten gains into the system is priced into current valuations.