4 - The “Great Recession”
Financial Speculation and Militarized Accumulation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
Summary
Drug lords need banks. A glimpse: Bloomberg Markets magazine’s August 2010 issue reported that drug traffickers who used a DC-9 jet to move cocaine from South America to Mexico had purchased the jet ‘with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp’. But banks also need drug lords. In 2008, drug money saved the major global banks from collapse and thus, stretching just a bit, saved capitalism from a devastating internal crisis when the speculative capital markets imploded.. . . Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime [told The Observer in London] that he had seen evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse.
Journalist John Gibler, in To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug WarInformation
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- Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity , pp. 128 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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