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Belarus: New Haven for Offshore Cash?
By admin | October 30, 2008
“We still measure up to international standards in our anti-money-laundering campaign. But why try to be ahead of everyone and struggle with laundering of some American money here, in Belarus, on our tiny patch of land? So we decided we would not require declarations,” Lukashenko said.
With this open invitation to those seeking financial privacy (popularly known as money launderers), the Belarusian President last week announced measures to tighten bank secrecy and make it easier for locals and foreigners alike to deposit funds in the country. The President went on to comment that “foreign citizens are coming to Belarus having serious money on them.”
Whilst I am not advising my clients to pack their dollars in a Samsonite and head for Minsk just yet, it’s interesting to see the de facto global alliance against financial control of currency beginning to rupture. I could count on one hand the number of countries which have publicly stood up against the global pressure to control financial transactions (I seem to remember the President of Guyana made a statement along these lines some months ago)
But you don’t need to be smart to realise that what people say in public is often very difficult from what they do in private. In the past decade it has become harder and harder to keep control of your own money. I’ve written extensively, for example, about the difficulties of buying physical gold. We all know that depositing and withdrawing physical hard currency in any significant quantity has also become very difficult. There are electronic dollars and there are paper dollars. Neither are backed by anything except debts and the goodwill of the Chinese, but still if the doo-doo really hits the fan and we see a bigger collapse (which wouldn’t surprise me at all) then I suspect paper dollars in your wallet might still buy you something of value, whereas dollars in the banking system won’t – because the banking system will be dysfunctional. Credit cards, wires and the like could stop working. No-one will want checks. And you will have no way to pay off credit card debt. Hence, of course, the US government’s war on cash in order to reach the stage of total financial domination.
Today it might be crackpot dictators with little to lose standing up in public against USA’s War on Cash. Tomorrow, who knows? The dollar is headed down again today. Next week is the US election. At the end of next week I’ll be meeting a small group of concerned investors at a retreat in Panama. If you would like to know more, you’ll be able to read my blog entries over at www.QWealthReport.com
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Topics: Currencies and Cash | 2 Comments »
2 Responses to “Belarus: New Haven for Offshore Cash?”
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October 31st, 2008 at 5:53 am
[...] also offers up further evidence on his blog that the government’s conspiracy to control money is breaking, sovereign countries such as [...]
December 5th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
[...] booms! And as further evidence that the government’s conspiracy to control money is breaking, sovereign countries are beginning to reject the so-called anti money laundering controls that the US is seeking to impose on the rest of the [...]