June 1, 2026
Dirty cash, cleaner excuses
Squillions: How Money Laundering Won
Cash is vanishing from our wallets, but commenters say the dirty money never left
TLDR: The article says cash use is collapsing for normal people, but huge amounts of banknotes are still out there, likely tied to hidden money flows. Commenters split between blaming governments for snooping on ordinary people and laughing bitterly that the truly powerful seem to escape the rules.
The article’s bombshell is deliciously simple: ordinary people barely use cash anymore, yet mountains of banknotes are still floating around the world. In Britain, cash has fallen from 58% of payments to just 9%, but there’s still a startling amount of physical money in circulation. So where is it? The piece points a big, flashing arrow at money laundering — and the comments instantly turned into a full-on argument about who the rules are really for.
One of the strongest reactions came from people saying anti-cash laws hit regular folks, not the real villains. An Italian commenter described getting attention from authorities for withdrawing over 1,000 euros, while also shrugging that plenty of people still do the classic “pay less without tax” deal. Another commenter went even harder, basically saying the whole system exists to keep average people obedient while the rich and well-connected glide around it. That take lit up the thread’s mood: is this about stopping crime, or just watching everyone else?
Then came the darker hot take: governments may not be solving the mystery because they profit from printing money and don’t want to ask awkward questions. One user highlighted the article’s brutal ending — officials don’t dig deeper partly because they don’t know what they’d find, and partly because they haven’t got a clue. And because this is the internet, someone also swerved into comedy by posting a scrappy workaround for reading the article with JavaScript off, giving the thread that classic online mix of financial doom, anti-state suspicion, and nerdy pirate energy.
Key Points
- •UK Finance data cited in the article says cash accounted for 58 per cent of UK transactions in 2009 and 9 per cent today.
- •The article says the total value of banknotes in circulation has continued rising despite declining day-to-day cash use.
- •It reports that dollar bills in circulation grew from $759 billion in 2005 to $2.395 trillion last year.
- •The article cites Oliver Bullough’s figures that average Americans held $418 in cash in 2022, versus $7357 in circulation per person.
- •The Financial Action Task Force is quoted as estimating that cash physically transported for money laundering globally may amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.