Money-Laundering Report

One big conclusion from the binational money-laundering report released earlier this week is plainly that neither nation is doing much to stop it. Digging a little deeper, the fact that, as with arms traffic, it is mostly an army of "ants" (rather than big financial institutions) moving a few thousand dollars southward here and there makes the border a less than ideal place to staunch the flow of cash. If you figure that $25 billion is transferred to Mexico $10,000 at a time, that's 2.5 million ants out of a total of 250 million people crossing the border each year. With the sheer number of visitors, the odds are not in the authorities' favor.

(I trust that if I've screwed up a decimal point and it's actually not that tricky, a commenter will gently point that out to me.)