Even if your funds are 100% clean, AML flagging can lead to weeks of funds being frozen. People also regularly get refused bank accounts not because they were convicted of any crime, but because these AML risk assessment systems mark them as suspicious. To convince the bank you're not suspicious, you have to give their employees extremely intimate information about your personal business, and even that doesn't guarantee approval.<p>The asymmetries this creates in possession of private financial information, between the general population, and those who work in the banking sector, undoubtedly leads to the latter attaining a major unfair market advantage in finding investment opportunities, which will contribute to the growth of incomes of those in the financial sector outpacing the growth of income in the economy at large.<p>And we do see those working in the financial sector receiving a significant pay premium:<p><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-the-1-earn-so-much-and-what-to-do-about-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...</a><p>And seeing rapid growth in compensation between 1979 and 2005:<p><a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/" rel="nofollow">https://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/</a><p>>>Those in the financial sector were associated with nearly a fourth (23 percent) of the expansion of the income shares of both the top 1.0 and top 0.1 percent.<p>Beyond the inequality AML gatekeeping fosters, the global AML compliance industry costs trillions, and by at least one account, does almost nothing to stop crime:<p><a href="https://www.effectiveaml.org/aml-compliance-oxymoron/" rel="nofollow">https://www.effectiveaml.org/aml-compliance-oxymoron/</a><p>Which is obvious from common sense, considering cartels are not only successfully laundering billions of dollars in illicit drug sales every, but actually distributing billions of dollars worth of highly restricted Schedule I drugs to every city in North America, which is a much more difficult feat than laundering the proceeds of those sales.<p>The special interests that have emerged to provide these enormously illiberal and costly, and dubiously useful AML compliance services, like Elliptic mentioned in the article, will continue pushing for more mass-surveillance of financial transactions and criminalization of privacy.