Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering

Originally developed to reduce drug trafficking, national and international efforts to reduce money laundering have broadened over the years to address other crimes, and most recently, terrorism. These efforts now constitute a formidable regime applied to financial institutions and transactions throughout much of the world. Yet few assessments of either the achievements or consequences of this regime have been made. Reuter and Truman (1) explore what is know about the scale and characteristics of money laundering, (2) describe the current anti-money laundering regime, (3) develop a framework for assessing the effectiveness of the regime, and (4) use that framework to assess how well the current system works and make proposals for its improvement.