30 articles published
Analysis
Ecuador has detained Luisa González, Daniel Noboa's two-time rival, over $500,000 allegedly kept off her 2023 campaign's books. It leans on a fuel-trading trail already in court, and lands weeks before elections her party is barred from.
Analysis
A San Francisco start-up says it turned mercury into gold at ten times CERN's record, but has not said how much. Its own research suggests the near-term money lies in scarce medical isotopes, not gold.
Analysis
The IMF and World Bank met in Bangkok for the first time since 1991, with the Fund forecasting 3.1% world growth. Behind that calm figure, an AI boom and a war-driven oil shock are splitting winners from indebted losers.
Analysis
Tunisian police suspect gold traders of laundering nearly two tonnes of scrap gold in six years. The case exposes a market short of legal gold, run on cash and barely visible to anti-laundering controls.
Analysis
On 13 October the US sanctioned a Mexican racetrack it says a jailed former Zetas leader controls. Fourteen years after the Zetas' racehorse empire fell, horses remain a lightly policed channel for dirty money.
Analysis
Several trackers count stalled US data centre projects, and their figures diverge widely. Behind the gap lies one trend: a local backlash that may be reshaping where America's AI gets built.
Analysis
America's four tech giants plan more than $700 billion of capital spending in 2026, mostly for AI, more than their operations generated in cash last year. Debt is filling the gap, at a rising price.
Analysis
Two Federal Reserve presidents now say the AI investment boom is spreading inflation beyond data centres. Cooler tech investment would help them, which suggests the Fed may not rush to cushion a slowdown.
Analysis
US regulators fined Bank of America more than $1.2 billion for failing to report over $5 billion of suspicious activity. The order describes a bank that kept monitoring light and likely saved hundreds of millions.
Analysis
Washington has sanctioned Xinbi, a Telegram bazaar that has handled at least $24bn for Southeast Asia's scam industry. It is the third such market disrupted in two years, and each time the trade has moved on.
Analysis
OpenAI's revenue did not fall. A number that was never really OpenAI's has been replaced by one that is. The gap comes down to a simple accounting choice, and it shows how much of the AI boom rests on figures that nobody audits.
Analysis
BlackRock says AI agents may one day save in bitcoin and spend in stablecoins. The bigger risk is elsewhere: millions of agents built on a handful of models could make the same decisions, coordinate without talking and pay each other with no human in the loop. Banking rules, competition law and the fight against dirty money were not built for that.
Analysis
On 17 September 2026 Grizzly Research, a short seller betting against Raiffeisen Bank International, alleged that Russian customs records tied to the Austrian group's Moscow subsidiary cover $1.19bn of trade in goods matching Western restrictions. RBI denies wrongdoing and says an internal review cleared it. We set the allegations against what is established: a Russian unit that still earns hundreds of millions of euros a year, which RBI cannot sell, and which Washington and Frankfurt have pressed it to shrink since 2023.
Analysis
Set up by a fugitive oligarch and Russia's defence bank, A7 moved billions through hundreds of front companies, forged invoices and some of the world's best-known banks. On 1 October, Washington branded it a criminal organisation. Here is how the network works, who it served, and what it reveals about the limits of sanctions.
Analysis
Two US prosecutions, about $2.8 billion of AI hardware, the same playbook: a front buyer in Southeast Asia, a transit hub that requires no licence, a fake consignee, and money flowing back through intermediaries. Export controls are a customs problem on paper. In practice, they are a financial crime.
Analysis
AI has turned the humble memory chip into the scarcest component in the world economy. Three companies, two of them Korean, collect the windfall. China is racing to catch up, sometimes with stolen blueprints. And wherever a shortage creates rents, a grey market follows
Analysis
Markets now charge France more to borrow than at any time since 2008, and some investors are positioning for worse. The money lost to tax fraud is smaller than the interest bill, but it is the one sum Paris can recover without raising a single tax.
Analysis
Tether says it has helped freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked USDT this year. The same day, a Senate report found that 84% of sanctioned Iran-linked wallets run almost entirely on its token. Both can be true, and that is the problem.
Analysis
Within days of North Korean hackers allegedly stealing $387 million from Bitget, the people washing the money were posting in public help channels because a swap had not arrived. Here is how the machine works, and who runs it.
Analysis
A country of about a million people, two small satellites and a Hong Kong-backed spaceport project has joined America's rules for the Moon. For Djibouti, it is the latest move in a long game of keeping every great power close.
Analysis
The world's largest asset manager has lent its name and its models to three onchain portfolios. It does not issue them, run them or hold the assets. That gap is where the risk sits.
Analysis
The pound has lost nearly half its value since the start of the summer. Khartoum's answer is a new currency. Its first attempt created one country with two moneys.
Analysis
Since Monday, European banks can settle tokenised securities in central bank money. The ECB is preparing to buy some itself. It is not a digital euro for citizens. It is a bet on who controls money when finance moves on-chain.
Analysis
Ireland weighs under 4 percent of the euro area and delivered two thirds of its growth in the second quarter. That is not an economy. It is where American multinationals book their profits.
Analysis
Lebanon leads the foreign buyer rankings in exactly one Paris arrondissement. It is the 16th, and it is not a coincidence.
Analysis
Between 14 and 18 September 2026, five European governments moved independently to alert their publics to a shifting Russian threat, with France's intelligence chiefs briefing party leaders and 2027 presidential candidates at the Élysée. The assessments are convergent but conditional, pointing to a 2028 to 2029 window and a campaign of deniable sabotage rather than an imminent attack. A parallel energy crisis, with the Strait of Hormuz still largely blocked, compounds the strategic picture.
Analysis
The US Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled an "innovation exemption" on Thursday allowing platforms to offer trading in blockchain-based versions of shares. The measure gives trading venues and liquidity providers five years of relief from exchange and dealer registration rules, and follows the Senate's failure days earlier to advance President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency legislation.
Analysis
The US House has passed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill that lets President Trump impose tariffs of up to 100% on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, above all China and India. Analysts expect Trump to hold the authority in reserve as leverage rather than deploy it immediately, given a looming summit with Xi Jinping and delicate trade talks with New Delhi. China has already condemned the measure, and India says it will not change course.
Analysis
The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point to a range of 3.75% to 4% on 16 September 2026, its first increase since July 2023, in a unanimous 12-0 vote led by Chair Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump's own appointee. Trump, who has demanded rates of 1% or less, called the decision the work of a "hostile board" while insisting he still backed Warsh. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed back above 5% as the central bank signalled at least one further hike this year.
Analysis
No prosecutor or regulator has accused Polymarket itself of money laundering. But 2025 and 2026 brought the first US insider-trading prosecutions on its markets, one with a money-laundering count, academic estimates of heavy wash trading and informed trading, and a reported stolen-card attack on its new US exchange. We read the topic as a question about how one brand running an anonymous, stablecoin-settled offshore market and an identity-checked US exchange handles dirty money, and what regulators have done about it.
