The foundation for much of what we now know as anti-money laundering (AML) originated in 1970 with a piece of U.S. legislation that went largely ignored for a decade: the Bank Secrecy Act. This law requires financial institutions in the United States to assist government agencies in detecting and preventing money laundering by forcing them to report transactions of over $10,000 and maintain a paper trail of them. It took until the mid-1980s for banks to genuinely adopt the law, but in the following decades, and with subsequent codification of more AML practices, the U.S. became known as the global lodestar in the fight against financial injustice, thiefdoms, and criminality.
In its first few weeks, the Trump administration have sought to reverse 55 years of progress and launch the world’s largest economy onto a path of deregulatory delusion, opening the doors to kleptocracy, fraud, and the dissolution of consumer financial security.
