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Money Talks: Modern Money Laundering

January 20, 2026·35 min·3 clips

Money laundering is a $2-5 trillion industry, a scale comparable to the GDP of a large country.

Compliance sounds boring. Felix Salmon begins with that shrug, then gives Joe Salama room to make the case for one of finance's less glamorous jobs. Salama is Coinbase's chief compliance officer, and he does not treat the work like paperwork with better branding. He says compliance can be fun, always changing, and unusually close to the action when the goal is stopping money laundering. Salmon does not let the pitch sit there untouched. If one company adds friction, won't the money just slide toward a cheaper, smoother route? Salama takes the point. He compares it to locks and security cameras: one household can make itself harder to hit, but the risk may shift unless other households raise the bar too. His answer is shared annoyance. If enough firms make laundering harder, crime does not vanish, but the job gets slower and riskier. Salmon then pushes toward the number underneath the whole conversation: what does it cost to launder money, and does anyone expect to get caught? If the cost rises, the controls may be biting. If it stays cheap, maybe not much is changing. The episode keeps the jargon on a short leash. Crypto compliance, finance controls, incentives, and evasion all get pulled back to the same plain question: are criminals running into real walls, or just finding different doors? Salama is cautiously optimistic, though not starry-eyed. Cutting the cost number to a third within five years sounds unlikely, especially since it has mostly moved up. Still, he sees room for progress. It is a brisk, dry argument about whether modern laundering controls reduce crime or mostly teach criminals where to walk.

As heard by us

A clear, skeptical conversation about whether compliance can make money laundering costlier and harder to pull off.

Modern money laundering comes through as a systems problem: firms add controls, criminals look for lower friction, and the strongest compliance program can only do so much if weaker paths remain open elsewhere.

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Why you'd press play

The Coinbase executive whose job is stopping money laundering explains why the number keeps going up.

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