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Peter Pham
Peter is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network — entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.
Black money is that which is unaccounted for on balance sheets, tax returns or income statements. Put differently it is the shadow economy that is not counted in official statistics, definitely has not been taxed at the point of sale or criminal in nature, be it drugs or arms running, ransom to kidnappers, bribes taken by politicians and officers, etc. All of this will fall under the official term money laundering or tax evasion.
In 1996, the IMF came up with the hazy estimate that 2-5 % of the global economy is involved in money laundering of one form or another. Singapore and India just announced yet another plan to combat money laundering through their financials systems. In particular Singapore has been very aggressive as their prominence in the global financial community has increased in trying to vote this kind of money off their island. Another recent move to dramatically raise both the fines and the level of oversight of their two casinos was clearly aimed at deterring this activity flowing through their economy in an obvious attempt to attract capital fleeing the increasingly corrupted U.S. and European banking system.
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