{"id":22990,"date":"2017-02-25T17:30:56","date_gmt":"2017-02-25T22:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22990"},"modified":"2017-02-25T17:30:56","modified_gmt":"2017-02-25T22:30:56","slug":"how-much-money-laundering-is-going-on-in-the-housing-market-a-lot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22990","title":{"rendered":"How Much Money Laundering is Going On in the Housing Market? A Lot"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2017\/02\/24\/how-much-money-laundering-in-us-housing-market\/\">How Much Money Laundering is Going On in the Housing Market? A Lot<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><strong>Answers trickle in. Tough luck for New York, San Francisco, Miami\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cI am shocked \u2013 shocked \u2013 to find that money laundering is going on in here!\u201d<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Borrowed and twisted from\u00a0<em>Casablanca<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The US Treasury Department\u2019s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fincen.gov\/news\/news-releases\/fincen-renews-real-estate-geographic-targeting-orders-identify-high-end-cash\" target=\"_blank\">announced<\/a>\u00a0on Thursday that it would extend for another 180 days a \u201ctemporary\u201d program that was due to expire on Thursday, and that it had originally kicked off in January 2016 and expanded in July, to identify and track secret homebuyers who hide behind shell companies and \u201cother opaque structures\u201d for the purpose of money laundering.<\/p>\n<p>And it has already gleaned some insights.<\/p>\n<p>The US housing market has been a perfect platform to launder large amounts of money, no questions asked. Brokers, banks, and other industry professionals played along. There were no reporting requirements. Everyone in the world knew it. And they came to launder their cash by buying expensive homes.<\/p>\n<p>But FinCEN, via its evocatively named Geographic Targeting Orders (GTO), wants to know who these opaque homebuyers are. To find out, the GTOs \u201ctemporarily require US title insurance companies to identify the natural persons behind shell companies used to pay \u2018all cash\u2019 [i.e. without bank financing] for high-end residential real estate in six major metropolitan areas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>FinCEN is soliciting the help of title insurance companies \u201cbecause title insurance is a common feature in the vast majority of real estate transactions,\u201d and these companies can provide \u201cvaluable information about real estate transactions of concern.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In its July\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fincen.gov\/news\/news-releases\/fincen-expands-reach-real-estate-geographic-targeting-orders-beyond-manhattan\">announcement<\/a>, when the program\u00a0 was expanded from two metros \u2013 Manhattan and Miami Data \u2013 to six metros, FinCEN Acting Director Jamal El-Hindi wouldn\u2019t say to what extent money laundering was involved, but he did throw in a tantalizing tidbit: \u201cThe information we have obtained from our initial GTOs suggests that we are on the right track.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Much Money Laundering is Going On in the Housing Market? A Lot Answers trickle in. Tough luck for New York, San Francisco, Miami\u2026 \u201cI am shocked \u2013 shocked \u2013 to find that money laundering is going on in here!\u201d\u00a0\u2013 Borrowed and twisted from\u00a0Casablanca. The US Treasury Department\u2019s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)\u00a0announced\u00a0on Thursday that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2340,537,4254,4255],"class_list":["post-22990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-housing-market","tag-money-laundering","tag-wolf-richter","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22991,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22990\/revisions\/22991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}