Name: Oliver Bullough EVERYBODY LOVES OUR DOLLARS
Start: 2026-01-30T17:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-01-30T18:30:00+00:00
Location: Blackwell's Bookshop

A wildly entertaining deep dive into global money laundering, that exposes the dark financial secrets at the heart of the world economy.
About this Event

Everybody Loves Our Dollars

Without the existence of money laundering, few crimes of acquisition would be worth the trouble. South America's drug cartels would be stuffed without it, as would Nigerian kleptocrats, Afghan terrorists, American tax evaders and a whole bestiary of human (and animal) traffickers the world over.
And yet, estimates of the dirty portion of world GDP have held steady at 2%-5% for decades. All efforts at legislation, diplomacy, prosecution and compliance have been a complete flop. It's not a lack of will to stamp it out. It's a lack of insight. So join bestselling investigative journalist Oliver Bullough on a perspective-altering adventure through the flipside of the global economy.
In the criminal world, cash is still king (in fact, crime might now be the main thing cash is good for, and even why it still exists). Barter is pretty good too: vast, continent-wide exchanges of everything from luxury handbags to baby eels support a triangular drug trade linking Europe to the Far East. Cryptocurrencies flow through paper ledgers that would make a Florentine merchant feel at home.
And the system works. Whether you're a fraudster, a cartel boss, a corrupt politician, a kleptocrat or a terrorist mastermind, your options to move and hide your money are more secure and more impenetrable than they have ever been. There has never been a better time to be a criminal. It's time that changed.

Oliver Bullough

Oliver Bullough is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in the area of corruption. He is the author of Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. His previous books include Last Man in Russia: the Struggle to Save a Dying Nation and Let Our Fame Be Great. Oliver has written extensively in newspapers on issues of financial transparency and corruption. He is currently on the board of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) in Ukraine.