Two years ago if you ran a bank in Iraq and wanted to move a single dollar to New York you mostly could not. No western bank would clear it. The country was a compliance risk…This weekend it began to turn. Iraq’s prime minister walked into the CBI and handed it to the man who used to run the country’s anti-money laundering office. Just two days before the Global Financial Watchdog handed Baghdad a written list of nine fixes on a deadline. Clean the books. Trace every owner. Open the doors. Do that and the system lets Baghdad back in. This is not a theory. Eight months ago, Nigeria and South Africa did exactly this. They worked their way off the same watchlist. Almost overnight the correspondent banks came back. The extra scrutiny eased and Nigeria alone pulled in around $30 billion of investment that had been sitting on its hands…Getting off [that list] is the way back to the dollar and Iraq just stepped onto that path. Reset Intelligence
