So that's what they mean when they say we're losing the war in Afganistan. Losing out on the drug trade!

Let's cut to the bottom line: What we are talking about is GREED. plain and simple whether it's drug money or lier's loans. Moral rectitude is no longer something that is valued. Over the year's I've come close to getting into some pretty dicey situations which led to try to live by this - Righteousness Pays with Happy Days.

Todd

Chimp: You have a great website-I just hope we don't hear that you got "depressed" and decided to jump out of a helicopter like that BreX guy. Keep up the fight for truth.

For those of use who are not proficient at searching LATOC, could someone assist in getting these links posted here? Thanks.

Ok this is something I know nothing about. (never have done cocaine or heroine but did have Fentanyl after a routine procedure once - nice!)
But trillions of dollars?!? C'mon.
The average dose is 300-500mg - lets say 400.
The average price is $71 per gram. So 2.5 uses per $71. So $28 per use.
$1,000,000,000,000 / $28 = 35.2 billion doses.
You said 'trillions' so lets triple that to 100 billion doses.
Assuming each heroin user uses the drug once a day, that is 100 billion / 365 = 275,000,000 users?
Can that be right?
To put that 'trillions' number in perspective, 86 million barrels of oil per day x $97 per barrel x 365 days = $3,044,000,000,000 or just over $3 trillion spent on oil each year (though this would be most ever since 2008 is highest price ever for oil, while heroin prices have plummeted)

Something not right here. Though it makes me think that there would be a positive feedback loop on the ratio of Heroin use/Oil use - e.g. the more heroin used globally, the less oil, as people would be crashed out on their basement carpets.

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Booms in drug money laundering tend to coincide with construction booms, in case anybody here wasn't aware of that. Examples include Dubai which is both the money laundering capital of the world and the construction capital. In the 1980s, that distinction belonged to Miami. In the documentary "Cocaine Cowboys" a former drug lord explain that cocaine money built "half of Miami." That's just one example.
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Another example (supposedly) is the boom along the Spanish Med coast in the run up to the currency switchover (when people were faced with having the origin of their peseta's being looked at - some people didn't want to say where the peseta's came from).

Drugs, Oil, and the bankers. Yes! May as well add terrorism in there too. They are all tied together. That is why I have always given my very highest recommendation to watch the The Truth and Lies of 9/11, Mike Ruppert's post 9/11 lecture. It's a great starting point.

As further reading, I would recommend "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina" by Peter Dale Scott.

This book shows the connections between the three, the involvement of the CIA and the banks involved in the money laundering. Particularly interesting to me were the parallels drawn between what is known to have happened in Indochina in the 1960s and 70s with what appears to be happening in Afghanistan and Colombia today.

Theories of the illicit drug business being connected to international banks or the White House or oil services companies or Dick Cheney have been around for a long time. Unfortunately, they don't add up.

I suspect a lot of the heroin money from Afghanistan was laundered into the Big Banks now getting their asses kicked who used it to fund the suburban building boom (borrowing it from the drug bank at say 4% and then loaning it the subprime and Alt-A lumpenproles at 6%.)

You should learn how financing works before making these kinds of claims. The large homebuilders are public companies which borrow against their value - cumulative worth of their company as measured by their stock - in the bond market using Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to insure against risk. They do not borrow from banks. Smaller homebuilders borrow construction funds from the regional banks; it has been the only business these banks could find as the costomer loan business - revolving credit and auto loans - have been taken over by large, national banks. It is doubtful that Sovereign Bank or Suntrust ... or Wachovia ... are 'drug banks'.

Please provide sources if you can.

You also need to study how the mortgage market is structured. 'Drug banks' or other banks don't turn around deposits into mortgages. If they did so, the current financing crisis would probably not have taken place. Mortgages are originated then transfered to companies that 'deconstruct' the loans into sections and repackage those sections as bonds; the bonds are given high ratings by rating agencies then sold to investors. The investors have little knowledge of what it is - or was - they're buying.

While there is the cloak or anonimity to this process, this would be too dangerous to a criminal, since the 'counterparty' could be a person who would call the FBI. Commercial (depository) banks are highly regulated. Criminals deal with people they know and trust for this reason. Drug financing tends to be simple, cellular and personal.

Also, unless you really know what you are doing, you can lose your shirt in a hurry in the 'trading' markets. Criminals don't want to risk a big loss in a market similar to today's.

... a lot of the big energy infrastructure projects are being financed with laundered drug money from off-shore money-laundering banks as these banks offer very competitive interest rates

Again, this is nonsense. An energy company will finance a large project directly from the bond market, it won't borrow from a bank. Part of the financing will be Federal Agency subsidized with state- issued loans loans or loan guarantees providing the balance. These loans will be made from the bond market.

Part of the current crisis exists bacause a large part of the banking industry's core business - making loans to large (and safer) entities - has decamped for the bond markets.

The last notable bank caught up in a money laundering operation was Riggs Bank in Washington, DC in 2004. It was convicted of laundering funds for the account of the late Augusto Pinochet, for the dictator of Equatorial Guinea and for some Saudi diplomats. None of these accounts were related to drug trafficking.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2005-01-27-riggs_x.htm

Believe it or not, the government gats money from busting banks and others convicted of illicit activities, in the Riggs case, the fine to the Treasury was $25 million.

Banks in Miami have made money by processing remittances to immigrants or taking as deposits remittances from relatives in Latin American countries. The banks in these countries are unreliable and the Miami banks are substitutes ... for burying money in the back yard. The amount of remittances is very large; approximately $70 billion:

http://www.iadb.org/mif/remesas_map.cfm?language=English&parid=5&item1d=2

While the drug trade is large, the greatest amount of money is in the marijuana business, which is largely domestic or Canadian and Mexican.

Trying to put a value on street drugs is difficult, anyway, since drugs are usually easy and cheap to produce. So- called 'street' prices (cumulative) are more or less speculations, but would not reflect on global totals since producers do not sell the drugs on the street, but simply transfer uncut drugs out of the producing areas. The prices at this level is a lot lower than the street price. The cumulative producer price is about $12 billion, which seems a reasonable number:

http://www.havocscope.com/Drugs/drugs.htm

It does not add to the credibility of the Oil Drum when conspiracy theories are recycled.

That is likely why we are seeing declining oil prices, at a time when fundamentals would say they should be rising.

???? Most of the established fundamentals analysts have been sceptical of these high oil prices all along. Everybody in the oil industry I've talked to in the last year said they didn't believe these prices were sustainable. Everybody outside the oil industry said prices could only go up. Number one industry number cruncher PIRA has been the biggest bear all through the 140+ bull market, and they're now vindicated.

Obviously all the distressed selling (not to mention all the short spec money) is going take this market to rediculous lows, but anyone claiming that fundamentals say oil should be rising has not read many reports.

I seriously doubt that, huge restrictions have been put on money transfers between countries since 9/11. All important transactions are closely watched, I have a friend that got into trouble because of an substantial transfer of money between Haiti and Canada in relation to a family inheritance, the money is frozen and basically in limbo now. Having say that, I know there is an important shadow economy where drug related money is recycled in real estate projects (we have a lot of recent stories around that here in Montreal).