"Balzac had it right: 'Behind every great fortune, there lies a great crime.'" - Jonathan Freedman.

[Joe Chi Minh]

It's weird world we're living in:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/07/mafia-cash-economy-le-carre

[snagglepuss]

1. Rivetting. Thanks for posting . Highly recommend.

snip

The story broke long after Le Carré had finished Our Kind of Traitor, but it confirmed everything the new novel is saying: that a huge slice of the global economy, as much as a fifth on some estimates, is made up of the fruits of organised crime; ...

The problem is so vast, people somehow fail to see it. "Nobody picked it up!" a still incredulous Le Carré said of that UN statement when we met in his Hampstead home today. "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I really did have the feeling that it had been suppressed." He sees too many unanswered questions, starting with how exactly that $352bn came to pass into the legitimate economy. "What buttons do you press, who do you call? Whose consent do you seek?" Did someone in government wink to the super-crooks, telling them they no longer had to keep their money in cash in, say, the Cayman Islands, but could now buy government bonds? If so, who and on whose authority?