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🕴️ Meyer Lansky’s Mob Finance Model
Key Methods:
• Money Laundering: Cleaned illicit funds through casinos, nightclubs, hotels.
• Offshore Accounts: Swiss and Caribbean banks used to hide and move money.
• Shell Companies: Created layers of fake corporations to hide ownership.
• Cash Businesses: Used bars, laundromats, etc., to “wash” money.
• Global Reach: Built a transnational financial network long before globalization.
• Informal Networks: Relied on loyalty and secrecy, not legal contracts.
Goal: Avoid detection, taxes, and enable liquidity for criminal operations.
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🏦 Federal Reserve System
Key Functions:
• Monetary Policy: Controls interest rates, inflation, and money supply.
• Transparency: Public reports and Congressional oversight.
• Dollar Management: Issues and manages the world’s reserve currency.
• Regulated Banks: Subject to KYC, AML, and capital requirements.
• Domestic Focus: Focuses primarily on U.S. economy, though global effects exist.
Goal: Ensure financial stability, control inflation, maintain dollar trust.
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💵 Eurodollar System
What It Is:
• U.S. dollars held in non-U.S. banks, beyond the Federal Reserve’s jurisdiction.
Key Traits:
• No Reserve Requirements: Freer creation of dollar credit.
• Light Regulation: Less oversight than domestic U.S. banks.
• Widely Used: Major corporations, offshore banks, and governments rely on it.
• Anonymity: Less transparency than Fed-controlled systems.
• Global Liquidity Tool: Fuels derivatives, trade finance, and interbank lending.
Goal: Provide fast, global, unregulated dollar liquidity.
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🧩 Key Comparisons
Shadow Liquidity:
• Lansky = criminal shadow liquidity.
• Eurodollars = legal shadow liquidity.
Avoiding Oversight:
• Lansky: evade law enforcement.
• Eurodollars: bypass U.S. financial regulation.
Trust-Based Networks:
• Lansky: relied on loyalty and underground trust.
• Eurodollars: based on interbank trust and global credit relationships.
Decentralization:
• Both operate outside centralized state control (unlike the Fed).
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🧠 Insight
Meyer Lansky’s financial network was a blueprint for decentralized finance — just in an illegal context. The Eurodollar system is the legal version of that idea: unregulated, offshore, and invisible to national oversight. Both systems reshaped global finance by decoupling control from sovereignty.
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