Topic: Paper Money

Joe Biden claimed that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than schoolteachers due to capital gains loopholes, a statement challenged as a factual distortion. Simultaneously, the "FinCEN papers" leak via BuzzFeed revealed that global banks moved over $2 trillion in suspicious funds between 1999 and 2017. Deutsche Bank and HSBC are heavily implicated in the reports, which involve money laundering for criminal organizations.

German authorities raided Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt as part of a money laundering investigation linked to the Panama Papers. Media reports, including those from Amy Goodman, attempted to link the raid to President Trump’s past loans from the bank. Critics argue that mentioning Trump in the context of the raid is a distraction from the actual targets of the money laundering probe.

The discussion turns to the $11 trillion held in offshore tax havens, as revealed by the Panama Papers. Lagarde discusses the "Base Erosion and Profit Shifting" (BEPS) project aimed at closing tax loopholes for corporations. She emphasizes the need for "global leadership" and an automatic exchange of information between countries to eliminate "holes in the system."

Senator Ted Cruz rejects the claim that money is not speech, calling it a "canard" that would fail a first-year law school exam. He asserts that from the founding of the Republic, the expenditure of money has been integral to distributing speech, citing the Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. The hosts mock Cruz's use of the word "canard" while agreeing with his legal assessment.

A theory is proposed that the swine flu could be used as a pretext to declare a bank holiday and transition the economy away from paper currency. The hosts suggest that labeling cash as a "petri dish" for germs would allow the government to force a move to RFID-chipped plastic cards and digital transactions. This shift would make the monetary base more manipulable by central authorities.