I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t as much in SEK notes being smuggled from the country as the Scandinavian governments believe and would try to sell to the public and amongst themselves. I just think their calculations are not properly factoring the way things can be done and are being done and thus the governments are sort of misleading themselves just because of relative ignorance.
Real estate and vehicle transactions in Sweden, in relatively popular Swedish second home markets abroad, in foreign labor source markets and elsewhere have become a big part of the money laundering picture along with illegal invoicing games for goods and even services. Then they may settle in part in cash and smurf the black money back into the above ground economy without the cash having ever physically moved abroad. And the dirty little secret of the underground economy is that cross-border money laundering nowadays is way less cash intensive nowadays than it used to be. They have truly learned from the ways of multinational corporations and other businesses in order to engage in cross-border money laundering without big physical cross-border movements of cash.
Earlier this month I had to play the Bank of Baht for some Swedes in Thailand stuck with SEK notes which they couldn’t convert but needing way more THB notes than they had anticipated needing. Fortunately for them BankID worked in Thailand so they could transfer me money in kind.
There is a quasi-Swish-like/QR code type peer-to-peer electtonic payment facility that is increasingly used by Thais, but I haven‘t gotten around to looking how to use it as a foreigner in Thailand unless having a Thai bank account.
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